Brian Cox Explains Quark Gluon Plasma to Joe Rogan

for everyday life. There always is. It's just finding out how to do hard things is usually useful, is the moral. And it wasn't just the Higgs boson particle that you guys have discovered. What is quark-gluon plasma? Yeah, so that's shortly after the billionth of a second after the big bang. You end up with a soup of quarks and gluons. So quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons and gluons are the things that stick them together. So a proton has two up quarks and a down quark and a neutron has two down quarks and an up quark and so on. So they're the constituents, the protons and neutrons, which are the constituents of our atomic nuclei. So if you go to very high temperatures or high energies, then the protons and neutrons fall to bits and you end up with a soup of quarks and gluons, then that's a quark-gluon plasma. And it's insanely dense, right? Yeah, well, very high energy. So you get that. So we've been exploring that by, we don't only collide protons together, we can collide lead nuclei together or silver nuclei together at the LAC. And that's when you make these kind of soups of nuclear matter, if you like, very hot nuclear matter to explore that physics, that nuclear physics. Wow, and I was reading something about the weight of that stuff, like a sugar cube. What is the actual weight? Well, it depends how dense it is. So I don't, I mean, the thing I remember is the sugar cube of a neutron star material, which is, I don't know, how many, 100 million tons, I can't remember. You know, it depends. So I don't know with a quark-gluon plasma, I don't know what number your... There was something, there was one of the things after the discovery they were talking about, the massive weight of quark-gluon plasma and they're like almost incomprehensible. Yeah, yeah, I don't know the number of it. But something crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Now, once these, you got something? Oh, here it is. 40 billion. Oh my God, a cubic centimeter would weigh 40 billion tons. Oh. Good Lord. I didn't know that. I know David. I know David, actually. That's so crazy. I think it's a huge energy. The densest matter created in the Big Bang machine. What are they doing right now? It's closed for engineering and upgrades. Upgrades. Yeah. I mean, one thing we're trying to do is, one of the things in particle physics is that you want as many collisions per second as you can generate. And then we have a collision, we have what's called a bunch crossing at LHC. We can vary it, but it's something like 25 nanoseconds, depending on what, so it's really, we get a lot of collisions per second. And the more collisions per second you can get, the more chance you have and make an interest in things like Higgs particles or whatever else may be out there waiting to be discovered. I mean, it's possible there are other particles out there that we haven't yet discovered that could be within the reach of the LHC. And if this one that was in Texas had gotten built and it was more powerful than the LHC, you'd have even more opportunity to do something like that. Now, when these things are created by these collisions, how long do they last? Oh, fractions of a second. So the general rule in physics, in particle physics, is that the more massive it is and the more things it can decay into, the faster it'll do that. So basically the heavy things decay into light things. And so the stable particles are things like electrons and some of the quarks, the up quarks and down quarks are stable things. But so everything tends to decay very fast. So we're talking fraction, billions of a second fractions. And how are they less than that? How are they registering its existence? Like what is being used to measure it? So what you see, if you collide, at the LHC we collide protons together. And protons have got loads of stuff in them, loads of gluons and the quarks. So you get a big mess, first of all. So most of it's a load of particles that are spraying out, which you're not interested in. But sometimes when you went, let's say a couple of the gluons bang together and they can make something interesting, like a top quark or a Higgs particle. What's a top quark? A top quark is a very heavy, there's six quarks. So there's up and down, charm and strange, bottom and top. Charm and strange? Yeah, so strange was literally in the, what was it, the 50s? We discovered them, someone said that's really strange. So it's a strange and new kind of particle. So yes, we have six quarks. They're in three families. So the up and down are one family. And then the charm and strange are another family in the top and bottom of the third family. And so for some reason, so the only thing, the only particles we need to make up, you and me, are up quarks, down quarks and electrons. But for some reason, there are two further copies of those which are identical in every way, except they're heavier. So there's the charm and the strange quark and a heavy electron called a muon. And then there's the top and the bottom quark and another heavy electron called a tau. And that's it. So there's this weird pattern that we don't understand. So it seems like you only needed the first family to build a universe. But for some reason, there are two copies. Now, when the heavy ones decay into the lighter ones is the point. So when you make them, they're not around very long. And just to answer your question, what happens is that when they decay, they throw their decay products out into our detector. So we take a photograph of the cascade of particles that comes from these heavier particles decaying. And the trick is to patch it all up to see, to try and sort of work out what everything came from. Wow. Now, when they find these unexpected particles, then what happens? Then there's the study of them, then everybody gets together and go, okay, what the hell is that? Yeah, what is that? What do we do? So we want to know where the Higgs particle, we know what it does, which is it gives mass to everything. So it's fundamentally the thing that gives mass to all the other things in the universe at the most fundamental level. So electrons, for example, and the up and down quarks, they get their mass from their interaction with the Higgs. That's why they're massive. That's another reason we exist. We go right back. We wouldn't exist if there wasn't mass in the universe. And the Higgs is ultimately responsible for that mass. I keep caveat in it because then you get other sorts of mass that are generated, but that the fundamental basic seed, as it were, is from the Higgs. So what we want to know is we want to know how that thing behaves. And the way, so you want to study it. So you want to make a lot of them. So you can take a lot of pictures of it and study it a lot and see exactly how it does that. And so that's what we're doing. That's what we're engaged in at the moment. We're making high precision measurements of the way that particle behaves. So we can understand the laws of nature. I mean, that is the laws of nature. How are those particles behaving and what are they doing?