JAD ABUMRAD: Okay. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: We're still desperately looking—seeking symmetry, as you say.

JAD: Yeah. No—not well.

ROBERT: We have looked at love ...

JAD: Failed.

ROBERT: Looked at brains ...

JAD: Failed.

ROBERT: Looked at mirrors ...

JAD: Failed.

ROBERT: The chemistry of life ...

JAD: Failed.

ROBERT: So we thought, well, for the last stop on this trip, if we were to go anywhere to find or look for deep unity, a deep oneness, and symmetry, maybe ...

JAD: The beginning.

ROBERT: Yeah, of everything.

JAD: Moment zero.

ROBERT: So we found ourselves a physicist. Again, it's Neil deGrasse Tyson. I began with a very, very basic question.

ROBERT: If you look at me and I look at you, and you seem to be made of stuff, and I seem to be made of stuff, and here we are, and here are tables, and chairs, is it a surprise to you, in some deep way, that we are all here, made of stuff?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, it's not so much—surprise understates it. It's shocking, really. It's shocking.

ROBERT:  Huh.

JAD: What is—what is shocking?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That there's any matter in the universe at all.

JAD: Meaning that this conversation shouldn't be happening?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, it's way deeper than that—thank you. It's deeper than just whether or not we'd be having this conversation now. It's whether or not any of this would exist—Earth, the galaxy, and the like.

MARCELO GLEISER: Okay, so if you go back 13.7 billion years ago ...

ROBERT: That's Marcelo Gleiser again, the physicist. And he says if you roll back the history of the universe ...

MARCELO GLEISER: No more stars, no molecules, no atoms. If you played the movie backwards now ...

ROBERT: All the way to the beginning.

MARCELO GLEISER: Just after ...

ROBERT: You know ...

MARCELO GLEISER: ... the Big Bang, you have what we call a primeval soup.

ROBERT: This soup was—it actually was made of light.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: A universe of light with very high energy.

MARCELO GLEISER: And out of this energy, this heat, these interactions …

ROBERT: You suddenly get ...

[belching sounds]

JAD: What the hell is that?

ROBERT: These are belches, Jad.

JAD: Belches?

ROBERT: Belches of matter.

JAD: The light is doing this?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes. This is what E=mc² is all about.

ROBERT: Because energy is just a form of matter.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And vice versa.

JAD: I feel like I should know what you're talking about, but I don't. 

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, let's start—let's start a little simpler. There's light all around us. We're in a studio, it's visible light. So this light has no mass, has energy.

JAD: E but no M.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Mm-hmm. Crank up the energy of the light, go to ultraviolet, x-rays, and there's a point in x-rays where you have a high enough x-ray photon, it will spontaneously turn into a particle—electrons, in fact.

JAD: Oh, so you're saying if you crank up the E, the energy of the light high enough, it'll suddenly just turn into mass?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That's correct.

ROBERT: So Jad, just picture the soup, really intensely hot, and it's belching out matter.

MARCELO GLEISER: Electrons, zooming around.

ROBERT: Photons.

MARCELO GLEISER: Sparks.

ROBERT: Neutrons.

MARCELO GLEISER: Neutrinos.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Continuously churning, churning, churning.

ROBERT: Over time, all that matter clumps together in more and more complex forms until you finally get us. Sounds very simple, doesn't it, Jad?

JAD: Yes, but there's a but coming. I can smell it.

MARCELO GLEISER: But—and here's the big but ...

JAD: Knew it.

ROBERT: Back in ...

MARCELO GLEISER: 1928, 1929 ...

ROBERT: ... there was this physicist ...

MARCELO GLEISER: Really young guy, Paul Dirac.

ROBERT: Paul Dirac. He's doing some math, and he's thinking about this whole business of turning light into matter.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Now he's puzzled by something.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: There is a law in physics called the Law of Conservation of Charge, which simply means this:  if you ...

JAD: My, how it rolls off your tongue quite nicely.

ROBERT: Doesn't it?

JAD: It does!

ROBERT: So here's what it means.

MARCELO GLEISER: Whenever you create something, if at the beginning, you have zero electric charge at the end you have to have zero electric charge too. That is, you cannot create electric charge, you have to keep the balance.

ROBERT: If you make something in the universe that has a positive charge or a negative—like, make an electron. Okay, just make one.

JAD: Right now?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Gone!

ROBERT: That electron has a—you may remember this from eighth grade, a negative ...

JAD: Negative one, baby!

ROBERT: Make—make two electrons. There you go. Now make three electrons.

JAD: Negative three.

ROBERT: Now if the universe is to stay in balance, you need to have something that has a positive charge. You've got three minuses on one side, you have nothing on the other side.

JAD: Wait a second, if this is true, how would you even make an electron? The sheer fact of creating an electron puts it out of balance.

ROBERT: Well, here—here's the solution.

JAD: The fundamental story here is wrong.

ROBERT: Here's—well, no. Paul Dirac thought, well, how about this? What if every time you created an electron, you created an anti-electron? [laughs]

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Every particle could have an equal but opposite antiparticle.

MARCELO GLEISER: That is, a particle that looks very much the same, but essentially, its electric charge is reversed.

JAD: It would look the same? Like, really look ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes, you'd have to measure their properties to know that they were different.

ROBERT: Is it a mirror image?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You might think of it as a mirror image. There's a thing called quantum spin, and it would be spinning the opposite way. But charge is the most obvious difference.

MARCELO GLEISER: For example, the antimatter cousin of the electron ...

ROBERT: Because the electron has a negative charge, this little guy should have a positive charge.

MARCELO GLEISER: Exactly.

JAD: But in every other way, it would be the same.

MARCELO GLEISER: Right, and ...

ROBERT: But no one had ever seen one. He just thought that there probably would be one?

MARCELO GLEISER: Yes.

JAD: And why did he think this?

MARCELO GLEISER: Math.

JAD: Math.

MARCELO GLEISER: Math. It was a solution to these equations, and that's the beauty of theoretical physics. By solving equations, you can sometimes find out about the world. And then, yes, a few years later ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Ba-da-bing!

MARCELO GLEISER: They found the positron.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: The antimatter version of the electron.

JAD: Ooh!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah. No, it's deep, it's deep.

ROBERT: How did they do that? Like ...

JAD: Did they actually see it?

MARCELO GLEISER: Well, particles, you know, they're very tiny, right? You can't really see them. So what you do is you create little systems in the laboratory. You get like a vapor ...

JAD: And you put the vapor in a tank, he says. And when the electron or the antielectron shoots through the vapor ...

MARCELO GLEISER: The particle destabilizes the vapor and makes little bubbles, okay? You can see these little bubbles appearing out of nothing.

JAD: Wow! Seriously?

MARCELO GLEISER: It's really an amazing thing. 

JAD: So you can't see the particle itself, but you can see its shadow?

ROBERT: It's—it's road trip.

MARCELO GLEISER: It's road trip, yeah.

JAD: So then he says okay, imagine you get this little piece of light and you heat it up really hot so that it spawns—well, as we learned, not one particle but two ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Matter-antimatter pair.

JAD: Put them in the vapor tank ...

MARCELO GLEISER: And if you put a magnet in there, you can tell if it's going to the left or to the right, if it's a positive or a negative charge.

ROBERT: Oh, very clever!

JAD: Oh, how cool!

MARCELO GLEISER: It is cool.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You see two particle tracks that each curl opposite directions, and if they have the same rate of curl ...

ROBERT: Yeah?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That means they have the same mass.

JAD: So if we go back to our picture of the early universe of the soup, which—and you named all of those particles, does that mean that for every particle that you named, there is its opposite floating around there as well?

MARCELO GLEISER: Exactly. You have electrons ...

ROBERT: Anti-electrons.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Neutron-antineutron.

MARCELO GLEISER: Proton-antiproton. This is all very beautiful and you would say, great, I have a very democratic universe, you know, as many particles and antiparticles, and everybody's happy. Only problem is the following: when an electron and a positron meet ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: They will find each other ...

MARCELO GLEISER: And, uh-oh ...

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And they will annihilate.

ROBERT: What do you mean they'll find each other, because they'll find their original other half?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, no, they wouldn't need to.

ROBERT: They'd just find another kind?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That's correct. That's correct.

ROBERT: So Jad, now imagine that we're in the very early universe. I am a teeny bit of matter and you, my opposite ...

JAD: I'm an anti-Krulwich.

ROBERT: An Anti-Krulwich. And so the particle, which is sitting here and I see you across the haze. Now I'm positive charged, you're negative charged. Opposite charges attract. Attract. Attract.

JAD: And we are zooming together. Here we come. [screams]

[explosion]

ROBERT: You see, it doesn't work out too well for us. But, you know, wait, wait, wait, this is actually a rather profound puzzle, because if Paul Dirac was right, and half the universe is matter, the other half the universe is antimatter, and we all bump into each other as we just did, well ...

JAD: Eventually, I guess we would just not—we would just become—I don't—well, I don't know. Hmm.

MARCELO GLEISER: We would not be here then.

ROBERT: You just blink out and there'd be nothing.

MARCELO GLEISER: Exactly.

JAD: Really nothing? So it's a field of ...

MARCELO GLEISER: Mostly, nothing. Mostly just radiation—radiation—radiation—radiation—radiation—radiation—radiation.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It's shocking—it's shocking—it's shocking—it's shocking—it's shocking.

ROBERT: Well, there's something wrong with this theory because we're talking to each other, and we're ...

JAD: Exactly.

ROBERT: So something—something's wrong with this notion.

MARCELO GLEISER: Yes, and what's wrong is an imperfection in the laws of physics that we know of now, and that is responsible for this bias.

ROBERT: Which means what? There was—that there was a little more of—of matter, what we call matter, than antimatter or ...

MARCELO GLEISER: Yes. There was, to be precise, to every billion particles of antimatter, we had a billion and one particles of matter.

JAD: Oh my God, really?

MARCELO GLEISER: Yes.

JAD: Wow!

MARCELO GLEISER: And that tiny excess of one in a billion is enough to create everything that exists now.

JAD: One lone little guy!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We would call that an asymmetry.

ROBERT: So everything we see in the universe, all the stars, all the suns and the moons, and the grass and the mountains and us, all that, we're the left—we're the extra stuff?

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yes.

MARCELO GLEISER: We are the result of this asymmetry.

ROBERT: Has anybody dealt with the real question that's provoked here? It's like, why was there more of one stuff, kind of stuff than the other kind of stuff?

MARCELO GLEISER: So there you go. That is one beautiful question, but we don't have any—any final answer yet.

JAD: You don't know?

MARCELO GLEISER: Because you see, you don't know. We do not know, that's—which is okay. Not knowing is a wonderful thing in science, otherwise, you could just retire.

ROBERT: [laughs]

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Can I tell you my favorite lawyer joke, told to me by a lawyer?

ROBERT: Yeah.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I have to, like, spread this because it's the best one: 98 percent of lawyers give the other two percent a bad name.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: Well, that's the go music.

ROBERT: The go music, meaning go away.

JAD: Meaning us. Or here's a different place to go, to our website Radiolab.org, where you can read more about anything you heard in this hour. You can see those amazing Lincoln pics and other things we've got there on symmetry. And of course, you can subscribe to our podcast.

ROBERT: Which means you get to hear the show, you know, whenever you like.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Brenna Farrell.]

[LAUREN SILBERT: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard and Lynn Levy.]

[JOHN WALTER: With help from Jessica Gross and Douglas Smith.]

[LAUREN SILBURT: Special thanks to Eric Asani, Sam Rudman, Abby Wendell ...]

[MARCUS DU SAUTOY: Sean Carrol, Annie Pack, Joe Gall ...]

[MARCELO GLEISER: And Natasha Gostwick of Storynory.com Okay, hope I passed. Bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of mailbox.]

 

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