Basement: Daniel Whiteson | CERN, Dark Matter, and the Aliens Next Door
4/20/20263 hr 24 min
The Why Files releases video episodes on Spotify every Monday and Friday. And when you become a Spotify Premium subscriber, you get fewer ads – that means more story, less interruption. Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at UC Irvine and an active researcher at CERN's Large Hadron Collider — the largest machine ever built — where 5,000 scientists are using high-energy collisions to read the universe's secret menu. He co-hosts the show Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, co-created an award-winning science show for preschoolers, and recently wrote a book asking whether aliens would even recognize our physics at all. His work sits at the collision point of experimental science, philosophy, and the biggest unanswered questions in physics — what everything is made of, why gravity is so weak, and whether the universe has a bottom. DANIEL LINKS sites.uci.edu/daniel X - @DanielWhiteson Podcast - Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Clips
Showing 10 of 13Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAJ Gentile· Host0:00
Today I am 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.
Hecklefish· Host0:14
Oh, CERN, huh? The place with the Shiva statue out front and the interdimensional portal out back. Oh, yeah, I know the place.
AJ Gentile· Host0:22
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. Uh, we also get into some places I didn't expect to go, like what happens below the Planck scale.
Hecklefish· Host0:52
Ooh, below the Planck scale. Uh, that's where the lizard people keep the good stuff.
AJ Gentile· Host0:57
We also get into why dark matter might have its own version of the Higgs boson, and why a philosopher named Hartree Field rederived 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.
Hecklefish· Host1:16
Uh, 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. Humans are such sheep.
AJ Gentile· Host1:24
Anyway, this was a lot of fun.
Hecklefish· Host1:26
Sheep.
AJ Gentile· Host1:27
Let's go down to the basement.
Hecklefish· Host1:28
Meh.