The Why Files: Operation Podcast
Basement: Daniel Whiteson | CERN, Dark Matter, and the Aliens Next Door
20 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
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.
Oh, CERN, huh? The place with the Shiva statue out front and the interdimensional portal out back. Oh, yeah, I know the place.
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.
Oh, below the Planck scale. That's where the lizard people keep the good stuff.
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.
You know who else built an app that tracks things from space? The NSA. But at least they had the decency to lie about it.
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Chapter 2: How does Daniel's book challenge our understanding of physics?
Humans are such sheep.
Anyway, this was a lot of fun. Sheep.
Let's go down to the basement.
Hey, you can watch the Y-Files on Spotify. New video episodes every Monday and Friday. And premium subscribers get fewer ads, which means fewer interruptions when things start getting weird. Daniel, welcome to the basement. Thank you very much for having me. So excited to talk to you about all of this crazy stuff in science. Me too.
So, yeah, we're going to get to some of those baffling secrets of the universe. But here's what I really want to know. What is the secret to making... A killer Nutella nut roll. Like, how did you become famous for that? A killer Nutella nut roll? I mean, I heard that you have a strong baking game. I do. On my CV, for example, I have a cookie recipe.
You have a list of awards, papers, favorite cookie recipe. I put that in there actually just to see if anybody's reading that at all. And I'll sometimes get an email from somebody who's like, Hey, I tried your recipe. It's pretty good. What is it? What's the cookie? It's chocolate chip oatmeal cookies with tahini. That's the key. That's the key? Absolutely. I love tahini.
I'm a sucker for halva or anything with tahini and it's sesame seeds. That's my kryptonite. We're going to try that.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Daniel provide about dark matter?
I always heard that baking is science. Yeah, it's chemistry, right? There's transformations, things change phase. It's incredible what happens there. And it's a great example of emergence. You see stuff happening on the bigger scale, like this dough turns into cookie.
You don't know what's going on underneath the microscopic details of what's happening with all the baking powder and the vinegar or whatever. It's like magic to you, right? There's some microscopic detail and then boom, it turns into a cookie. And you don't always have to know, you don't always have to care.
But it's incredible you have this experience on the macroscopic scale, and then there's all this stuff happening underneath. Were you baking before you became a scientist, or did you say, you know what, I've got an idea? I've got a sweet tooth. Okay. And I love gluten. Who doesn't? I've been baking forever. I know, gluten is God's gift to humanity. Yeah. Another question that I need to know.
What's your favorite video game that you programmed? That I programmed. That you programmed. You were a coder. I am a coder. I was a coder. I started programming in basic on a Commodore VIC-20, right? Same. Tiny amount of RAM and you stored your programs on cassette tapes. Yes. Yeah, I'm OG programmer. I remember when my dad brought home our first computer, transformational for me.
And yeah, I wrote Tic-Tac-Toe was my first game. First you write the two-player version, and then you're like, I want to play against the computer.
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Chapter 4: How do we explore the universe through particle collisions?
How can I program a little bit of computer intelligence in there? What is the strategy for Tic-Tac-Toe? So you used ASCII characters, refreshed the page. Refreshed the page is CHR$147, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah.
Yeah, and eventually you realize, wow, tic-tac-toe is not that complicated a game. You can write a computer player that's unbeatable, that can't be beaten. And then you get interested in deeper games, write checkers, write chess. Those are really hard. Now hold on a second. I've got to challenge you because Whopper, didn't Whopper tell us that there is no winner to tic-tac-toe?
Do you know what I'm talking about? Whopper was the game show? No, that was the big computer in war games. Oh, okay.
remember where the only shall we play a game yes the only strategy is not to play yeah that's right yeah everybody loses in global thermal nuclear war yes it does yes it does yeah but if you play tic-tac-toe right you should get a draw every time right um and that was something i only discovered by writing a computer player that i couldn't beat which was pretty cool yeah vic 20 um
When I'm talking to other, can I call you a nerd? Yes, I'm a proud nerd, absolutely. When I'm talking to other nerds, we always have this competition about who started at the lowest baud rate. Lowest baud rate when you first connect, you first dialed up to CompuServer BBSs. What's your lowest baud rate? Let me see. I ran a BBS, actually. You did? At my home, yes. I had one on my computer.
on mom's phone line on mom's phone line we racked up a bill yeah we had a second phone line actually um you know and we had people all over the country um all over the world contributing it was a lot of fun i was so enamored that was you know this is well before internet oh yeah in your house right this is everything is dial up and so i think it was 14-4 uh kilobaud was my or my slowest
That was your slowest? Oh boy, I go back to 150 bot. Wow. But I'm a lot older than you. I'm in the presence of a sysop. That's amazing. What got you started in that? Because I mean, VIC-20 is, I think that came out in 81 or close to it. What got you started in computers that early? Yeah, well, my dad was working at the lab in Los Alamos. So I grew up in northern New Mexico.
He was working at Los Alamos. Yeah, absolutely. In the early 80s. I have questions that I probably can't ask. And I probably can't answer. Was he doing secret stuff for the government? Yeah, he had acute clearance and so did my mom. And both of them worked at the lab. And I never saw their offices. I don't know what they worked on. They were always behind the fence. Wow. Yeah, absolutely.
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Chapter 5: What new discoveries can we make with our smartphones?
It doesn't line up with this. It doesn't line up with that. It's something new and weird. It's not simultaneously a particle and a wave. It's neither. It's something new that's somehow kind of captured by this and that. It's like you eat a new fruit and you're like, I have sensing notes of cranberry. I'm sensing notes of an apple. It's not sometimes an apple and sometimes a cranberry.
It's some new weird thing that's kind of reminiscent of things you're familiar with. And so we tend to have this language in our minds of ideas we know how to play with and talk about and think about things that make sense to us. And I do think that that limits our capacity to explore the universe already, even without aliens coming and giving us crazy ideas.
You know, quantum mechanics is already pushing us maybe to the edge of being able to understand that. We can use mathematics, we can use philosophy, we can talk about it, we can build our society based on understanding of quantum mechanics, but we may never like really truly grok it because of fundamental limits in the way our brains work. And I think that comes out of our intuitive experience.
You know, the things you interact with when you were a child, I think it comes out of our senses, you know, the things, the ways we see the universe, the tiny slice of the universe that we are actually able to perceive and interact with. It must shape the way that our minds work.
and this primitive language of intuitive objects that we demand everything get translated into, which is terribly confining. I mean, it's very powerful, but it's also really confining. I'm glad you've mentioned that, because when you think about certain birds using cryptochromes in their eyes to entangle and see the magnetic field of the Earth, that's bananas. It's incredible.
So it's possible there are senses that we just don't have them. Certainly there are. We've discovered them, right? We know that there are senses out there, right? There are fish that can sense electric fields natively, right? Yes. What is that like? What is the experience of that, right? They're doing radio communication essentially, no? Yeah.
And that to me is frustrating because it suggests we could have had telepathy. Right?
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Chapter 6: How do we communicate with aliens if they think differently?
We could sense electric fields, we could generate electric fields. Why can't we just think back and forth? Why do we have to go through this whole like lip flapping thing, right? Physics does not prevent telepathy. In fact, it enables it. So I don't know why we didn't evolve telepathy. It's a big missed opportunity.
But so certainly there are senses out there that we don't have that prevent us from interacting with the universe in a native way that aliens might have. Right. Maybe just they got lucky evolutionarily or they evolved in a different environment that demanded those senses. Right. And so they have these different senses. Or maybe, for example, aliens are microscopic.
Right.
Here's a mind-blowing potential is, what if aliens can interact with quantum objects without collapsing them? Wow. Right? I mean, the reason that photons collapse when you experience them, if I shoot a photon at your eyeballs and I give it a probability to go to the left or to the right, you only see it in one. Right. Because your eyeball is a classical object. It's big. It's fat.
It collapses that wave function. But if you were tiny, if you're microscopic, if you are a quantum object, quantum objects can interact with other quantum objects.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of the Drake equation on alien life?
They get entangled, but there's no collapse. What if you could experience both branches of that wave function natively? You could just like, oh yeah, 60% this one, 40% that one, instead of being forced to choose. You live in that world, you're a tiny microscopic alien that can interact quantum mechanically without collapsing stuff. what you're understanding are quantum mechanics.
It's just mechanics.
It's just mechanics.
Right? It's just the way the universe works. Right. And you come to meet us, you probably don't even understand what we don't understand, you know? Like when I try to explain how to program the VCR to my grandfather, like, what's confusing about this? It makes perfect sense. All of our grandfathers. Like, where are you missing the story? I don't get it. So many blinking 12 forever. Exactly.
Is there anything mathematically that prevents that? Because intuitively, that sounds like it could be a thing. I think it could be a thing. There are limitations to how small you can be and still have information and have it be not too noisy and develop intelligence. Are there limitations? Because aren't we back to Planck again? What if there's... What if there's not, we're only 5% there. Yeah.
We're only 5% there. Yeah. I think that's a possibility. Um, I don't know. I'm not an expert in neuroscience and you know, I think when we're talking about aliens, we should imagine all sorts of crazy possibilities for how they could process and store information. And you could definitely do a lot of information processing a lot smaller than we do it.
Um, especially if you're not using organic neurons. Um, So yeah, and I'm not an expert in brains at all, but it seems to me like aliens could very likely have a different set of senses, a different kind of experience of the world. Our experience of the universe is not the only way to experience it. Another possibility is like, what if aliens are made of dark matter?
Yeah, I was just gonna ask you, what if they can see dark matter just with a sense that we don't understand, and maybe the sky is full of stuff that they can just see. Yeah, absolutely, because it could be that aliens, if they're made of our kind of matter, You know, we hypothesize that dark matter might have a new kind of force that lets it interact with our kind of matter.
We hope that it has that force. We have no evidence for it.
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Chapter 8: How does curiosity drive scientific discovery?
We hope because that would let us discover it. If there is some sort of like interaction between dark matter and normal matter, not the weak force, not the strong force, not gravity, not electromagnetism, some new force. Doesn't it have to interact with our stuff because otherwise everything would fly apart, no? It has to interact with our stuff via gravity.
And you're right, that's what's holding galaxies together and shapes the large-scale structure of the universe, definitely interacts via gravity. But via gravity is very, very weak, right?
So if there is dark matter out there and it only interacts gravity, there's basically no way we could discover if it's made of particles because a dark matter particle that interacts only via gravity, undetectable. Gravity is way too weak, right?
um but if there's another force and this is the big hope that maybe there's some other force out there that lets normal matter interact with dark matter and we could see dark matter winds interacting with us somehow Well, if aliens can sense that force, then maybe they could see dark matter natively, and to them, it's not a big mystery, right?
To them, they see the whole picture, and they went a very different path for their science, possibly. Or even weirder, if they're made of dark matter, right? If dark matter is some new kind of particle or new kinds of particles, and it has dark physics and dark chemistry, why couldn't it have dark biology, right?
You know, we're talking about 5% of the universe made of atoms has all this complexity in it. Now the other 30% of, of, of the universe, why shouldn't it have complexity, right? Why shouldn't it be made of many different kinds of things with complicated, uh, emergent phenomena? Maybe it's boring, maybe it's simple, but maybe it's very complex and maybe there's life in there.
In which case aliens could be made of dark matter instead of normal matter. And, and wow, what a different way to experience the universe. So I love that theory. I never considered it. But it also makes me wonder, we may not have the biological capability to understand how to create the device or the mechanism to ever see it.
Because we don't... You can't find what you don't know what you're looking... You know what I mean? You don't know what you're looking for. Maybe we just... We can't perceive it. Yeah. It's possible, but I will always bet on humans to figure this stuff out. We've discovered dark matter even though it was hard. It was not obvious, right?
This is why it took so long to figure out that dark matter is even there. Now we have lots of very convincing evidence that something is there, some kind of matter. We don't know what it's made out of. We don't know how it works. Something is out there. Something is gravitating. And I think we'll figure it out.
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