Send Me To Sleep | Quarks (Voice Only)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, it's your host Andrew here. If you're enjoying Send Me To Sleep so far and you'd like to help support the show, the best way to do that is Send Me To Sleep Premium. Over there you'll get ad-free episodes as well as access to all of our bonus episodes. You can find a link to a seven-day free trial in the description notes. Thanks so much for listening and here's just a few ads before the show begins. There's a piece of scientific trivia that is almost cliche at this point, as it's been doing the rounds for quite a long time.
How does the episode introduce quarks and the idea that atoms are mostly empty space?
And it goes something like, atoms are in fact 99% empty space. And I think that resonates with people quite a lot because it gets at something fundamentally absurd about the nature of the matter that makes up the entire universe. And that is, despite the fact that we feel like we live in a universe filled with solid things, a universe that is tangible, In fact, there is an inherent emptiness to all of that seemingly solid stuff. which is, of course, relatively counterintuitive. But of course, we could then explain away some of that and say it, of course, appears to be empty or perhaps devoid of matter. But what we are feeling when we pick up the mug from the table or sit in the chair is the forces of
in between the matter so to speak that is pushing up against each other this gives us the the feeling of a tactile universe, I suppose. But something I find even more fascinating and counterintuitive is not just that the fundamental building blocks of our universe are a majority empty space, but that when you really get down to it, the very most fundamental building blocks, the quarks, are actually not directly measurable at all. And this is something that I didn't understand until very recently. But quarks, though we've known about them for some time now, decades now, you cannot actually perceive them. You can only ever see the effects of what they have created, the ramifications of their interactions with things.
And so we know that protons are made of quarks. but that is only because we collide them against each other or other things and we can see what happens to the debris of that proton and the behavior of that collision and the interactions of the debris would heavily suggest that there is something that is like a quark contained within the proton but we couldn't ever actually find a thing and point at it and hold it between some infinitely tiny tweezers and say here it is here is the quark We can't perceive it and that might even be an inherent nature of the quark itself. In fact, a quark cannot exist by itself. It is something that creates things emergently from themselves but does not exist internally.
in a separate piece a tangible piece as we understand matter to be now this fact has very interesting philosophical ramifications namely in my mind is that if the very smallest things in our universe cannot be directly observed, directly measured, interacted with in any tactile way, in what sense do they exist? And then further to that point, in what sense does anything exist? Which is quite a difficult question to pass.
Why can't we directly observe quarks and how are they inferred from collisions?
We seem to enter into a paradox there. But this may be because we struggle to define precisely what it is to exist. Of course, this is a large question that has been debated for a very long time. But it seems like there are two main camps of debate. belief in what it means to be a thing in the world. Um, the first is, uh, I suppose you could describe it as a materialist view where things that exist are simply made of matter and, um, can be interacted with in a tangible way. Um, And then the second would be, I suppose, emergent things, which could be described as existent but not necessarily tangible. And I suppose therein would be where the quark would lay. But other things that sit in that camp, I suppose, would be things like a wave in the ocean.
Of course, a wave is made up of water, which is made up of individual molecules of H2O, which in turn again is made up of further subatomic particles. But the wave itself, you know, you couldn't pick that up.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:31
2
How does the episode introduce quarks and the idea that atoms are mostly empty space?
0:31–4:54
3
Why can't we directly observe quarks and how are they inferred from collisions?
4:54–9:57
4
What philosophical questions arise from quarks being unmeasurable?
9:57–21:44
5
How are materialist and emergent views of existence contrasted?
21:44–35:40