Daniel Whiteson

Today, I'm talking with Daniel Whiteson.

He's a particle physicist at UC Irvine and an active researcher on CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Every 24 nanoseconds, his team smashes protons together and waits for the universe to show them something new.

His new book is called, Do Aliens Speak Physics?

And the question it asks is wild.

Is physics something we discovered or is it something we invented?

Because if it's invented, aliens might show up one day with a completely different version and ours might be wrong or at least incomplete.

It's hard to explain in an intro, but it's pretty wild.

We also get into some places I didn't expect to go, like what happens below the Planck scale.

We also get into why dark matter might have its own version of the Higgs boson, and why a philosopher named Hartree Field re-derived gravity without using numbers.

No math.

We also talked about how your phone is secretly a cosmic ray detector.

And that's true.

Daniel built an app.

Anyway, this was a lot of fun.

Sheep.

Hey, you can watch the Y-Files on Spotify.

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Daniel, welcome to the basement.