What broke the grand unified force in the early universe?

25:30I'm rapping. And then suddenly I hear a voice. Hey, open the gate. Let him in. The gate slowly went. They all they're watching this and they watch me walk into there. And that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen to Laugh But Not Least with MC Jen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers like composer Mark Shaman. Once you've established that you have the talent, it's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with.

26:06You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. We would sit in kibitz for hours and then eventually get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together laughing. Lawyer Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can. I mean, you can really make a difference to causes in the United States if you bring the right case at the right time. Marriage equality. Yeah, Windsor's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville. Film school teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary.

26:40What do you want to say? Documentary's all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone. Your coworker who quote unquote doesn't read is reading romance. Your mom, BookTok, the entire internet. I'm Sanjana Basker. I'm Tyler McCall. And this is Radio 831, a romance podcast. the books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse, and what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn, and obsess.

27:25We're going to Wuthering Heights, which, for the record, is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance, age gaps, certain Russian hockey players, and sentient objects in love, which is a thing. That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

28:04All right, we're back. And Daniel, it's Physics 101. What are the five forces that we recognize today? All right, this is a lot of fun. And already people will disagree because some people say there aren't five forces, there are four forces, there are three forces, whatever. Let's start with the broadest categorization and say electricity, right? That's the thing that powers your laptop. And then magnetism, which will count separately and then unify later. And magnetism, of course, is refrigerator magnets and load stones and compasses and stuff like that. Then there's the weak nuclear force, right, which is responsible for like radioactive decay.

28:43It doesn't play a big role in our lives, but it's there and important. Then there's this strong nuclear force that's very important for fusion and holding the nucleus together. So those are the four quantum fundamental forces. And then there's gravity, which seems like a force to us and I think deserves to be included on this list because we hope to unify it with these four eventually. But that's the starting point. Historically, humans have been poking around and noticing stuff happening, and we built up this sort of phenomenological history. We see this kind of stuff, let's call it one thing.

29:19We see that kind of stuff, let's call it one thing. We started out with basically five fundamental forces. And so first, we can talk about how we unify them as we go backwards in time. And then in the next segment let's walk through the history of the early universe and see them breaking as time goes forwards okay real quick before we do that do we think that we've got all of the forces that matter or because we don't understand dark matter uh or is it dark energy which one do we not understand both neither we don't understand either of them okay are there is it possible that there's more forces we're gonna have to unify once we understand things better and these are just the five we're working with right now?

29:57Oh, yes. And I hope so. There could definitely be more forces involved in the dark sector. If there are lots of dark particles out there, they could interact with each other using new dark forces. There could be dark photons and dark Ws and dark Zs and all sorts of stuff. There could be a dark strong force. And dark energy could be the product of another force we don't know about either. It's really a big question mark. It's basically flying purple dragons where physics is concerned. So yes, these are the ones we know today. Good point. And I love the idea of a dark sector. I feel like that needs to be in someone's book somewhere.

30:31But okay, so how do we unify them? Yeah, so what we do is we notice that forces have things in common, right? But that doesn't mean they have to be the same. When we unify forces, we don't say electricity and magnetism are the same thing. what we do is we notice that they're two sides of a coherent whole, that they make more sense to click together than to keep track of them separately. Like if you have literally two sides of a coin and you never noticed that heads and tails are related to each other and you kept track of like heads and tails separately. And somebody told you, oh, did you realize that heads and tails are literally two sides of the same coin?

31:11That's where the expression comes from, right? It's much simpler because then you notice patterns like you can only see heads or tails. You can't see them at the same time, right? There's a relationship between them. If you add up the number of heads and tails, you get the number of flips you made, for example, right? So that doesn't require heads and tails to be the same thing. It requires them to be two parts of a larger whole. It's the same with like elephants. If you study elephant trunks and you study elephant tails and you don't think about the relationship between them, you're missing out on the bigger picture and your theory of elephant tails and trunks is not nearly as good as a unified theory of elephants that includes tails and trunks, right?

31:51So again, it's not saying tails and trunks are the same. It's saying that they're part of a larger whole. Got it. Yeah. You don't want to miss the whole elephant because it could squish you. That's right. And we made a lot of progress early on in finding connections between the electricity and magnetism with Maxwell. There were these different observations of electricity and magnetism, and people had the various laws about it, Gauss's law, Ampere's law, et cetera. And Maxwell put together the four laws that related these things, and he saw a bunch of symmetries here. And he noted that the equations were very similar from the magnetic and electrical points of view.

32:31Basically, you could swap the electric fields and the magnetic fields in the equations, and they wouldn't change. there was a symmetry there, right? That they were playing like the same role, asterisk, right? Almost. He actually noticed that there was a gap, that that symmetry almost worked and he wanted it to work. He like, oh, this would be so much prettier if it did work. So he penciled in the missing term that would be needed to provide this symmetry. There was no evidence for this term in the universe yet. He just said, hmm, boy, This would be more symmetric if it was there. And then he went out and looked for it and found it.

33:08That's displacement current. And so that shows you like, wow, there really is some symmetry in the universe. You know, following mathematical symmetries leads you to physical discoveries. I love that. And so we know now that electricity and magnetism have a very close relationship. You know, if you have electric charges and they move, that gives you magnetic fields. Or if you have magnetic fields that change, that can generate electric fields. So the two are very closely coupled. One can make the other one. Okay. But sometimes the universe has mathematical symmetry and other times it doesn't. Yes.

33:46So it's nice that it's here. But then we find that water needs different equations for different phases and that doesn't feel very satisfactory. And so I guess I'd like a whole episode on when you should expect the world to be beautiful and symmetrical and when you shouldn't. And I'm guessing the answer is we don't know. Yeah. Well, even within electricity and magnetism, the universe seems to reject perfect symmetries because you can't actually just swap electric fields and magnetic fields in Maxwell's equations because they have a really big difference. And that is that we have sources of electric fields like particles with charges are sources of electric fields, right?

34:24An electron just sitting there makes an electric field. But there is no such source of a magnetic field. Magnetic fields only come from charges in motion. There's no equivalent of the electron, no magnetron, or we call in particle physics a magnetic monopole. So one of Maxwell's equations has a zero in it to reflect the fact that there are no sources of magnetic fields, and another one has a non-zero to count the number of electric charges. So there is a fundamental difference there between electricity and magnetism. So they don't have to be identical. They just have to play nicely together. Okay, so they're linked, but they're not like a gradient from one to the other.

35:06That's right. Exactly. Though there is some evidence that the dotted line we draw between them is a little bit arbitrary. Because, for example, in a given situation, whether or not there is a magnetic field depends on who's looking at it. Like if you have an electron and you're holding it in your hand, it makes an electric field but no magnetic field. If I'm driving by in the highway at 100 miles an hour, I look at that electron, I see that as a charge in motion because it has a velocity relative to me. Charges in motion make magnetic fields. So my compass would measure a magnetic field from your electron.

35:43Your compass would measure no magnetic field. Is the magnetic field there or not? It's frame dependent. It's observer dependent. So where you draw that dotted line depends on the observer, which is a strong argument that it doesn't make sense to account for these things separately, right? These things really are deeply linked. And that is why you say that they're linked, but you said there's five charges and you gave them separate counts because they're linked, but they're different. They are different. And historically, they were separate. And then we brought them together. And there's a really powerful lesson in how we brought them together.

36:18Because another factor in electricity and magnetism is the strength of the force. Like if you're just sitting around at low speeds, electricity is much more powerful than magnetism. There's a law, the Lorentz force law, that tells you the force on a particle based on the electric field and the magnetic field. And the magnetic field has another factor in it. It's velocity, right? If there's no velocity, there's no force from a magnetic field. Okay. Yep. That makes sense because you said if you've got to be moving in that prior example. But what happens if you're moving at the speed of light? If you're moving at the speed of light, that velocity term, we write the speed of light as speed equals one.

36:58And so now the two things are totally equal. So magnetic fields are much weaker at low speeds, but at high speeds, they become just as powerful as electric fields. So at very high speeds, very high temperatures, if you have a gas of particles whose particles are moving near the speed of light, the magnetic fields are equally as powerful as the electric fields. This is the kind of thing we mean by unification at high energies. At high energies, the differences between electric and magnetic fields start to wash out. They become less important. Are we going to find that at all of our forces at high energy, they become the same?

37:35That's the trend. It's very tantalizing. It's the kind of thing that make particle physicists feel like it's possible to unify all the forces. It definitely happens here, and it happens every time we unify a force. We find that it happens at higher energies. Okay, well then let's jump to the weak and the strong force then. Exactly. So we have electromagnetism. It's unified. And the particle that mediates electromagnetism is the photon, right? There's a photon field, the electromagnetic field, right? And we did that by putting electricity and magnetism into a single framework. Well, it turns out you can do the same with electromagnetism and the weak force.

38:12You can put those into a larger mathematical framework that in the same way makes a lot more sense to keep track of and to think about like rotations and velocity dependence. It all works really, really well and explains a lot. But again, it doesn't work perfectly. There are still differences between electromagnetism and the weak force. And the most important one being the weak force is really weak. It's weak because the particles that carry it, the W and the Z, are really, really massive. Like the W and the Z weigh 80 and 90 times the mass of a proton, whereas the photon is massless. So the photon can fly forever through the universe, whereas the W and the Z are very short range because of their mass.

38:56So it's a very weak force. So this is a symmetry between electromagnetism and the weak force, but it's a broken symmetry. All right. So what do we do to the weak force to make the mass not matter? We crank up the energy because the mass of the W and the Z only matter if you don't have a lot of energy around. If everything has a huge amount of energy, the fact that one of them has some mass doesn't matter anymore. At the speed of light, the mass of these particles doesn't matter. So if you crank up the energy, then the weak force becomes stronger. It becomes just as strong as electricity and as magnetism.

39:32And those three strands all unifying to one beautiful theory called the electroweak theory, which unifies electricity and magnetism, uses group theory, which French mathematical nerds invented 100 years earlier just because they were having fun with numbers. Yay, nerds! And it turned out to be foundational in building our modern understanding of the universe. Another reason why you should give nerds money and leave them alone. Amen. And this all works really well. But one obstacle is like, well, why is the weak force different than the other forces? And that's the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs was like, how can you put these things together but also break that symmetry?

40:15You got to build the symmetry and then break it. So the Higgs boson is the thing that breaks the symmetry. It interacts with the W and the Z bosons and gives them mass, but doesn't interact with a photon, so leaves it massless. So not only can we unify electricity and magnetism into one force that's beautiful and wonderful and high energies, they all act the same. We can also explain how at low energies they are different. And the reason you have to be able to do both of these things is because we're pretty convinced at the Big Bang all of the forces were the same. And we know that now there are situations where they're clearly doing different things.

40:55And so we need to be able to explain how both of those things can happen. Is that right? A plus, Kelly. That's right. We live in a cold universe where things don't have the energy to fly near the speed of light. And so these differences matter. The weak force is measurably weaker than electricity and magnetism today, right now. But we do think in the early universe, it had more energy and it was able to ignore, essentially, the Higgs field. It didn't really matter. Because, yeah, you get a little bit of mass, but who cares? You know, it's like giving a speeding ticket to a billionaire, right? No, those billionaires.

41:28It's not going to slow them down. Shake my fist. They're always going too fast. All right. So things are going great, right? We were using group theory and mathematics to unify these things as we crank up the temperature. Things seem to unify beautifully. It's amazing. So let's get to the strong force. And here we're stuck. We would love to unify the strong force into some grand unified theory of physics that brings together all of our quantum theories, but nobody's been able to make it work so far. This is a target of physicists for decades and decades, even putting aside gravity, right? We haven't even gotten to gravity yet.

42:06We don't know how to unify the strong force with the electroweak force. So we really only have two quantum forces at this point, electroweak and the strong force. And we would love to stick them together. And I don't want to make light of the suffering of physicists, but I'm just going to note that electroweak appears to be abbreviated as eww, and grand unified theory appears to be abbreviated as gut. And so your notes say, we cannot yet unify ew into gut. And so that's the kind of problem you guys are working on right now. Maybe somebody needs to come up with like a bleh theory. That's right.

42:42Or like a vomit theory or something. And then the dragons can get cleared away. The theory of dragon vomit is going to bring us all together. That's right. Good luck. And so there are obstacles here. And one obstacle is that what happens when you turn up the energy, then the strength of these forces changes. So all these forces have a strength that depends on the energy. And with electricity and magnetism, as you crank up the energy, the two come together to have the same strength. And the weak force also merges together into one single strength. Really beautiful. As you crank up the energy, the strong force also changes, but it doesn't seem to grow together with the electroweak force.

43:22It's like a parallel line. It's not coming together. So that made people wonder like, hmm, is there something missing? And we've talked a lot of times on the show about the theory of supersymmetry. It's a theory that suggests that for every particle, there's a new kind of mirror particle called the super particle. And it was created for other reasons to explain why the Higgs mass is so small, which is a mystery we don't understand. And it's also this beautiful example of symmetry. And the math nerds love it. And they would love for it to be true in the universe. We've never seen any evidence of it.

43:55But if you add supersymmetry to the theory, then as you crank up the temperature, these forces do grow together. So it's like maybe we have a missing piece. Oh, there's a piece over here that people invented for other reasons. If we stick it in, boom, then at high temperatures, everything comes together. That's amazing. Wouldn't that be beautiful? That was a real motivating factor for people believing in supersymmetry. It felt like a huge clue. Unfortunately, we turned on the Large Hadron Collider. We didn't see supersymmetry. So, yeah, that would have been nice. But for now, we don't know how to unify the strong force with the electroweak force.

44:36It might happen. It might be that in the early universe something happened to bring these together. But we don't know how. And so we can theorize about a gut theory, a grand unified theory. But we don't know yet what that would look like. But looking ahead to when we do, what will the acronym be? Will it be ooze? Electro-weak strong? Ooze? Ooze, I think, is going to be a strong contender. That's excellent. It's important to figure this out. Or so, strong electro-weak? I don't know. All right. Anyway, we can move on, I guess, to more important things. And if I am remembering our list of five correctly, the last one is gravity that we haven't gotten to yet.

45:14Exactly. And this one is even harder because unifying a strong force with electroweak is challenging because they look different and the details are different. But at least they're both quantum forces. There are fields involved. There's momentum propagating through those fields, all that stuff. Gravity is a real head-scratcher because it's a classical theory. Einstein tells us that mass bends space and that space tells mass how to move. but it requires mass to have a location and to have a classical trajectory, to always have a place and a time where it is, and to go from here to there by going through space from here to there.

45:51And quantum objects don't behave like that. So we just don't know how to interface it with gravity. The search for quantum gravity is the most frustrating and exciting and terrifying and challenging thing happening in physics in the last hundred years. We talked about it a lot of times on the show, if you could unify a gut theory with gravity, you'd have a theory of everything. So you'd have a toe, and then you could make the theory called the toe-ooze, I guess. Nice. I've already lost. What does toe stand for again? Theory of everything. Theory of everything. Got it. And how is that different than the grand unified theory?

46:27Grand unified theory doesn't include gravity. So grand unified theory is electroweak plus strong. Okay. And if I want to add gravity, that's a theory of everything. Got it, got it. Okay, so gravity is the queen of the purple dragons. Yes, exactly. So force unification is very exciting and promising. Electromagnetism unified beautifully. The weak force added beautifully. Lots of Nobel Prizes won. Beyond that is speculative. So grain unified theory that includes the strong force, speculative. Quantum gravity that includes everything, a theory of everything, still very speculative. But we're hopeful.

47:02Maybe we'll figure it out. Okay. And we need to figure it out to really understand the Big Bang. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think so. Okay. All right. Then let's take a break. And when we get back, we're going to sort of go through the timeline of the universe to try to understand how this all played out. So we're going to play it all going forward.

47:46The Unhoused can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed unhoused parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBTQIA plus community, and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. We Deen House is a two-time Webby and Signal Award winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Wittler, a street doctor turned influencer whose work with the Unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to We The Unhoused on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

48:31Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast Tell Me Something Messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships, and adulting. The more you get comfortable with someone, the more their real self comes out, they're gonna be gross. What's the grossest thing about a man? Burping. Shut it down. Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes, and there are no girls on the internet for all your tech news. For your favorite celebrity kikis, check out Outlaws with T.S.

49:04Madison. Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader, and Vader was turned by RuPaul? Yeah, well, somebody turned him. Some old, old, old witch. Learn to love yourself unapologetically with BFF, Black Fat Fem, and start your day with intention with Waking Up With Ryan coming in July. Celebrate Pride with the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Pride, and listen now. You said to me, yo, you know, keep at it, because you let me rap for you. It was magical for all of us. We made it, we made it. Yeah, I'm like, we?

49:40You know, I'm like, I know these guys, but who are you? I'm MC Jin and this is Laugh But Not Lease. I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. Like the co-founder of Rough Riders, Darren D. Dean. Talking about as a kid. Do you remember that we met even way before that? Let me think. Did you walk up to the gate? That was me, D. That was you? That was me. The day we found out that you and the whole crew was at Hit Factory, the mission was to get me to go to the gate, start freestyling, and see if I could get in the studio.

50:12I'm rapping. And then suddenly I hear a voice. Hey, open the gate. Let him in. The gate slowly went. Come, come, come, come, come, come. They all, they watching this and they watch me walk into there. And that is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen to Laugh But Not Least with MC Jen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone. Your coworker who quote unquote doesn't read is reading romance. Your mom, book talk, the entire internet. I'm Sanjana Basker. I'm Tyler McCall. And this is Radio 831, a romance podcast.

50:53The books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse. And what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn, and obsess. We're going to Wuthering Heights. Which, for the record, is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance, age gaps, certain Russian hockey players. And sentient objects in love, which is a thing. That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

51:41We've established that you have the talent. It's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. We would sit in kibitz for hours and then eventually get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together laughing. Lawyer Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can. You can really make a difference to causes in the United States if you bring the right case at the right time. Marriage equality.

52:15Yeah, Windsor's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville. Film school teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary's all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

52:46We're back. And Daniel's going to start with the Big Bang and take us forward and tell us about how these forces split up? Question mark? Exactly. So we've been telling the story sort of backwards. We've been talking about taking the current universe at very low temperature, everything is very cold, and heating it up to unify things. But time flows forwards, right? And so let's instead tell the story forwards, also because that's the only chance we have to potentially maybe answer D 'Alaire's question, which was the whole point of this podcast. And so we're going to talk about the timeline of the early universe, and we're going to use some crazy numbers to talk about time.

53:24And so what do these times mean? Remember that we don't have a lot of data for these very early moments. You mentioned in the top of the podcast how we've seen the Big Bang. We've actually only seen back to like 380 ,000 years after the Big Bang. Oh, that's right. That's when photons were made. Yeah, okay. So a lot of this stuff is speculative, but essentially, you take our current model of the universe expanding and you run it backwards to predict what would have happened deep, deep in early history. Okay. So let's go as far back as we can. If you run the clock back 13.8 billion years, you get to a place where you would need quantum gravity to continue.

54:01Like we don't know how to predict what would happen because quantum mechanics is relevant and gravity is relevant. And so we call this time before the Planck time, because Planck is one of the grandfathers of quantum physics, or this is the Planck epoch. So before 10 to the minus 43 seconds in the universe. You can't go all the way back to t equals zero, because we don't know how to do that, right? Like general relativity predicts a singularity. Quantum mechanics says you can't have that. So like, how do you even get to t equals zero? So before 10 to the minus 43 seconds, we say that's the Planck epoch.

54:34And the laws that are involved are some theory of everything, some quantum gravity that we don't know. It's all the forces, all unified. So it's 0.4301 seconds before. Okay. All right. So we're really close to zero and all the forces need to be unified. So we don't know what's going on, but that's where we need to get. That's right. And Dalyre also asked, what is the content of the universe at every moment here, which I think is a really fun question. And at this early point in the universe, it's not meaningful to talk about particles because we don't think of the universe as filled with quantum fields.

55:14I remember here we're always talking effective theories, right? What is a useful way to describe the universe? And to talk about particles, you need energy in quantum fields to be a useful description of the universe. And we don't know what quantum gravity will look like. Like maybe it gets rid of quantum fields. Maybe it has something completely different. It's totally new and it tells a different story about the universe. So we can't even talk about like what particles were around because particles are excitations in a quantum field. And we don't know if those are going to be part of the theory.

55:45We don't have the theory at all. So we don't know what effective descriptions are going to emerge. We don't know what the fundamental theory is. We don't know what the like useful calculational tools are. We can't even really tell you. Wow. Okay. But exciting. Big question mark. Big purple dragons. All right. So as the universe expands, it cools. And so in the next era, which we call the gut epic, which is between 10 to the minus 43 seconds and 10 to the minus 36 seconds, this is after the threshold of 10 to the minus 43 seconds when the universe has cooled enough that gravity splits off from the other forces.

56:21So we have in our heads an order in which we expect the forces to stop unifying and we expect gravity to be one of the first to stop unifying. Okay, why? Because it's so weird and has always been the troublemaker? This is speculative, right? It could be that we're wrong about this. it's just that in our heads it makes more sense to combine them in the reverse order like to combine the strong force with electroweak and then unify all the quantum theories with gravity but we could be wrong okay and it could be that like you know we got to do this in another order so everything here is still very very speculative right depends on the details of quantum gravity which we don't have this next segment depends on the details of the gut theory which we don't have So this is one way it could have gone, not necessarily definitive at all.

57:09Okay. Right? But in this version, then the universe cools to a point where we can start to ignore gravity. And we can only worry about the quantum forces when we're making predictions. Right? And gravity is the weakest of all these things. And as the universe gets less and less dense, gravity gets less and less relevant. And so it breaks off faster. Okay. That makes sense. And at this point here, we have gravity, which we know, plus all the quantum forces unified into one force, which we don't have a theory for. We just have like a placeholder for it. But we can talk about particles now because we have the universe mostly dominated by quantum fields.

57:47But we don't know what those fields are, right? They're the fields that are part of some theory. We don't have the gut field, right? And we talk about particles in those fields. We call them the X boson, the Y boson. And there might be some unified gut force. And these are the mediators of it. I'm sounding like I'm waving my hands a lot because we don't really know. Because, again, we don't know how to unify the strong force. So this is just like a placeholder for what might have happened. But, like, the creation of the universe is so beautiful. And you all came up with the gut force. Like, I just, every time you all have a chance to impress me.

58:23But it's your gut. And then just stick with grand unified force and never allow yourself to use the acronym. him. But all right, anyway. I'll call it the grand ut force. How about that? No, forget it. It's too late. It's too late. You already did it. Move on. Yeah, I know. All right. So at this stage, we think we have a gut force, a single unified force carried by X and Y bosons, but we don't really know, right? It's speculative. The universe continues to expand, continues to cool, 10 to the minus 36 seconds. Now the strong force breaks off from the electroweak, and now we have two forces, right?

58:58And this is the era that we can describe very accurately with our physics, because we know about the electroweak force, and we know about the strong force. And the universe has cooled, and as it cools, these two forces start to behave differently. So again, the fundamental true underlying reality is not changing the laws of physics somehow, but how we describe it effectively changes. Like it makes sense now to talk about the strong force is different from the electroweak force because the universe is cooler. We're in a different phase where the strong force acts very different. And so it makes sense to treat those calculations separately, right?

59:34Instead of unifying them. The elephant's tail has run off by itself. Okay. But so now we would still have elementary particles and antiparticles. And do we know what kind of fields we're dealing with here? Is stuff pretty normal? Yeah. So now the content of the universe are particles we're familiar with. They are the electroweak particles, the W, the Z, the photon. There are matter particles, quarks, electrons, all these kind of familiar particles. Okay. Right? So the universe is cooled and broken into these familiar fields, and we have ripples in those fields as the content of the universe. Then something crazy happens.

1:00:12the universe starts to inflate, meaning very, very rapid expansion. So we were expanding before. Now we have kicked it into high gear. And this part, also very speculative, but we think the universe expanded by a factor of like 10 to the 30 in a very, very short window of time. That's the equivalent of taking like a cantaloupe and expanding it to the size of the observable universe. Whoa. So like really big deal. Yum. And remember, we don't know the size of the universe. So the universe could be infinite, which means it went from infinite to more infinite, right? Or it could have been finite so that it went from small or large and finite to bigger, right?

1:00:54We just don't know if the universe is infinite or finite. And exactly when this happened depends on the details of your grand unified theory, et cetera, et cetera. But the crucial thing is that the universe became very dilute. You had those particles already, and the universe spread out massively. So now there's just not a lot of particles out there. And so the universe is suddenly very, very cold, right? Very, very dilute. Then inflation ends. So all this energy that's powering the expansion of the universe, the inflation, that gets dumped into the other quantum fields. That energy gets dumped into quark fields and photon fields and all sorts of stuff.

1:01:33And so now the universe becomes very, very dense and hot again. This is called reheating. And this is really the beginning of what we call the hot Big Bang. Before that, very, very uncertain. After that, things are described very, very well. Everything we just said up to now is speculative and could be totally wrong. Everything we're going to say from now on is very, very well established. And what we mean when we say the Big Bang from this moment, somehow, maybe via inflation, dumping all the energy and reheating all the fields, the universe is very dense and very filled with familiar particles.

1:02:09And are we still dealing with the first second of existence? We are up to 10 to the minus 12 seconds. So still the first second. We're still dealing with the first trillionth of a second. Yeah. So that's pretty amazing. Yes. A lot of stuff has happened so far and just a few ticks on the clock. Absolutely. And then something really exciting happens, which is, look, you've created all these particles. You have matter particles. You have antimatter particles. Most of those annihilate. So the universe filled with matter, and then those particles find each other, annihilate, and now the universe mostly filled with radiation with a little bit of matter left over because you had a little bit more matter than you had antimatter.

1:02:54And that little bit of extra is what turned into me and you and most of the stuff in the universe. this tiny little extra bit of matter. We don't know why there was that asymmetry. We can't understand it. We have some explanations for it, but not nearly enough to explain what we see. Wait, so that tiny little bit of matter is all of the matter that still exists today? That seems like a lot of matter. It's a lot of matter, but it's a tiny fraction of the original amount of matter. All right, I guess it's all about perspective. But - Yeah, so the universe was dominated by radiation. Most of the energy in the universe at that time was in photons from annihilation.

1:03:30And so then things keep cooling. When we get to 10 to the minus 12 seconds, this is another phase transition of the universe where we're now cool enough that it matters that the weak force has heavy, massive bosons. And so now we say the weak force breaks off from electromagnetism, by which we mean none of the fundamental rules have changed. The only It changes the temperature of the universe. But no, it doesn't make sense to treat these two things together because it matters that one of them has really massive bosons and the other one has a massless boson. They start to act very differently. We're now hiking over those mountains instead of flying over them.

1:04:10And it matters if you're carrying a really heavy pack or not. And so we break those up and we treat them differently. Does that make sense? How did this all happen in a second? My brain is kind of trapped on something else. How did this all happen in a second? And how did we figure out the timing down to the like 0.000? But like, wow. I know. It takes me like an hour to get up and have coffee, even think about getting anything done. And by that time, the universe has already done all this stuff. Right. Yeah, it's crazy. And it's a fair question. How do we know this stuff? We know this by extrapolating our model backwards in time.

1:04:48And these models we've built from lots and lots of observations, the cosmic microwave background radiation. Large-scale structure, baryon acoustic oscillation. We've talked about all those things in the podcast. Dig into those. We have really, really well-constrained models for a lot of this stuff. Those models don't work perfectly. There's still like mysteries right now about that expansion. It's called the Hubble tension. So there's definitely things to learn, but it's a pretty well-established timeline after the reheating. That's incredible. That was one hot second. Yeah. And it's still going.

1:05:19between 10 to the minus 12 seconds and 10 to the minus six, you still have enough stuff in the universe to have a quark-gluon plasma. Things are still pretty dense. So quarks and gluons are floating around and it's still hot enough that they're not bound into objects, right? They can just smoosh around like at the heart of a neutron star. And then around 10 to the minus six seconds, things cool down and you form protons and neutrons. And then for like literally two minutes, there's enough heat and temperature in the universe for fusion to happen. Like the kind of fusion at the heart of stars that makes heavy stuff, that happened in the universe for a hot minute.

1:05:58And it made a little bit of helium and a little bit of lithium. And that's called Big Bang nucleosynthesis. And that's very, very sensitive to lots of the details. How hot was it? How many quarks were there? We know a lot about the early universe just from measuring how much helium and lithium was made in that first minute, super duper powerful test of the early universe. And then 400 ,000 years later, of course, things cool down and electrons find their protons and we get neutral atoms and the universe becomes transparent and we see the cosmic microwave background radiation. So that's the sort of timeline of the universe from the beginning when it was really hot, cooling down and we enter different phases of effective descriptions of the universe.

1:06:41Wow, it feels like the universe burned out. It had its first second, was really, really active, and then it was like, you know what? I did too much. I did too much. And then it just really slows down. And yeah. I don't think it has any regrets. I think what happened in the universe is beautiful. It is. It is. So back to Dallaire's question. He asked, what was the form of energy? Was it in photons? And so when the grain unified theory was ruling as the effective theory of the universe, we don't know. because we don't know what that theory looked like. We call it the X and the Y particles, just as sort of placeholders because some candidates have those two bosons in them, but we don't know.

1:07:21He asks, what caused the force to break down? It's just that the universe cools, and so then the rules you would use to describe things in a useful way change. Not that the rules of the underlying universe have changed, just our effective theories, our descriptions of the universe change. He asks, what were the steps of the breakdown? So we think that gravity broke off first, and then the strong force, and then the weak force, and now electromagnetism. He asks also, is there any relationship between the breakdown of this force and the inflation? Did one cause the other? So we don't know for sure, because a lot of this is before the time that we can study really, really well.

1:07:58Inflation is still speculative, and how grand unified theories treat inflation depends on the particular grand unified theory. So there's a complicated interplay there that we just don't know about really concretely. So what I got from your conversation with Ethan was that there's maybe a lot of disagreement about a lot of stuff. And so if I talked to 10 different people who had the same job as you, and they were given the same set of, I know, none of them as good as you, of course, of course. And they were given - You're gonna talk to other particle physicists? Never. No, never. Never. I promise.

1:08:35You're being very controlling, Daniel. I suddenly have these feelings of jealousy. Oh, my gosh. Oh, get over it. All right. So if those sets of questions got sent to 10 other particle physicists, would they give a roughly similar description or talk as you gave? Or would they have a very different sense of what we know and where the uncertainties are? I think that we would all agree on the later stages because those are things we've measured. We are pretty confident about the very early universe stuff, inflation. And before that, very speculative, you might get different opinions about what's most likely to work out eventually as a model.

1:09:15And I think probably I have an unusual philosophical take for a particle physicist. It's thinking about emergence and effective theories differently than and many particle physicists, but I'm not sure. Okay. Maybe I'll ask them over lunch and try not to disturb their guts with too many e's. Well, I hope that goes well. Let me know. This was a ton of fun, and we learned a bunch. Let's hear what our listener has to say. Thank you, Daniel and Kelly, for answering my question. That was really great. I have a better understanding now of the early stages of the universe. and I think what helped in that clarification is that two approaches you use to address the issues or the questions.

1:10:00One is the energy level, what happens when we crank up the energy and the second approach was chronologically how the universe evolved and the forces got broken down. And also what helped understanding it also the example of the different phases of the water So looking at the universe and the forces in that way also makes it easier to understand. And also I like very much the clarifying question by Kelly. It seemed like she was channeling my questions. So that was really very, very great help in getting Daniel to explain the answers in a very clear way and very logically. So once again, thank you very much.

1:10:47It was really fun listening to it and I enjoyed it. Thank you. Bye. All right. Thank you very much, D 'Alaire, for sending in your question and for riding with us on this journey back in time to unifying all the forces and then forward again to breaking them up to explain the universe we know and love today. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Until next time.

1:11:15Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and xDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

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1:13:10our new Stuff You Should Know Doing Science playlist. Out now. You want to know about Occam's Razor? The simplest explanation is usually the right one. We got you covered. Wondered what chaos theory is ever since the first time you saw Jurassic Park? Well, come on down. So, distill a nice pot of tea, everybody. Turn down the gas on your Bunsen burner and slip into your most comfortable lab coat and listen to the Stuff You Should Know Doing Science playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month and on the Drink Champs podcast we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture like Sway Lee Do you realize how legendary you are?

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