A Mountain on a Teaspoon - EWTS #022

Senan: Hello and welcome to Enough with the Science. I'm Senan.

Joe: And I'm Joe. Welcome to another half hour filled with crazy quantumstuff.[laughter]

Senan: Actually Joe, why don't you introduce this week's topic; we'llreverse the roles for a change.

Joe: Absolutely. We talk about many big topics here, but now we're talking about very, very small things that have very big implications, but not on apractical level. So we're talking about quantum states.

Senan: Yeah, we're talking about the weird states of matter, most of which are down to quantum weirdness, quantum physics and all that. So this is part two of course. Last week we did part one where we...

Joe: That's the normal order of the things we do part one first. That's good.

Senan: Well, as you pointed out in the past, except in the Star Wars universe. [laughter] Anyway, first off, because we've lots to cover this week,we're going to rattle right into it, is something called Bose-Einstein condensates.

Joe: Okay, so basically what we're looking at though are weird things that happen at the quantum level. Is that essentially our summary?

Senan: Kind of, yeah. They're weird states of matter. So when we force matter into a corner...

Joe: Nobody puts baby in a corner.

Senan: It does really weird stuff when you force it into a corner. Anyway, Bose-Einstein condensates, a theory came up with by two gentlemen, one of whom is very famous for his wild hair and a few other things.

Joe: Not the speaker dude.

Senan: And the other guy is not the guy who invented speakers. He is Satyendra Nath Bose. I've murdered it.

Joe: Yes you have. How much practice did you need to get this right?

Senan: I apologise to his relatives who are no doubt listening to us, for murdering his name. But anyway, he and Albert Einstein came up with this theory together that something called a Bose-Einstein condensate could exist, but it was many years before it was actually proved in a laboratory that it did exist.

Joe: They probably didn't call it a Bose-Einstein condensate. I imagine that would be very egotistical.

Senan: Well we know some person that likes naming stuff after himself at the moment. But I don't think Bose and Einstein were that type; they were humbler than that. So I know at some point in this conversation you're going to ask me what the hell is the point of this. So I'm going to get my retaliation in early.

Senan: Probably the most fundamental use of this otherwise useless thing is it gives scientists a glance into the hidden world of quantum waves because normally all that quantum wave activity and stuff that's going on at the microscopic, in fact much smaller than microscopic level, is not visible to our laboratory equipment. So it...

Joe: I have to say now I'm slightly disappointed Senan. Surely it's worth having knowledge for knowledge's sake. We don't need a practical application.

Joe: Well of course. They found this theory, they looked at the world, they used mathematics and went look at this, this is the way things work. And then it was proven in a laboratory how long? 40, 60, 100 years later? That's astounding.

Senan: I kind of feel like I'm being beaten with my own stick here.[laughter]

Senan: Anyway, right. Unfortunately, we need to delve into a little bit of physics theory before people will grasp what a Bose-Einstein condensate is. There's a phrase called a quantum state. We're talking about subatomic particles now, quantum particles and so on. A quantum state is the complete description of all its properties. So things like how much energy it has, how much momentum it has, how much spin, which is like an angular momentum thing, what its position in space is and so on.

Joe: Okay, now, but these things are atoms? Or these things are smaller than atoms?

Senan: They could be atoms, they could be protons, they could be neutrons, they could be electrons.

Joe: So its properties of any of those little bits.

Senan: They could be quarks, you know. But all of these things have a quantum state which is like the list of all their properties. Now the reason we mention that is because there are two families in all of this particle soup that matter is made up from. These are just categories. Every one of these particles will fall into one category or another. There's just two of them; bosons and fermions. Bosons are named after our friend Mr. Bose.

Joe: Einsteinians.

Senan: No, they're named after our buddy Mr. Bose.

Joe: What was his first name again?

Senan: Are you going to force me to insult his family yet again? [laughter] Anyway, you can look him up on Wikipedia. And the difference between bosons and fermions is that bosons are sociable and fermions are not.

Joe: Okay, that's a good description.

Senan: So bosons are very happy to share the same quantum state. So that list of properties like momentum and speed and all that stuff that we mentioned a moment ago, a bunch of bosons are very happy to all be in the same state, all have those same set of properties. Not the case with fermions. If you have a bunch of fermions together, they must all have a different quantum state. None of them can have the same quantum state. It's called the Pauli exclusion principle, and we'll be talking about it some more later.

Joe: Oh good. [laughter]

Senan: And it is a very fundamental aspect of physics in that...

Joe: So the Pauli exclusion principle only applies to fermions.

Senan: That's right, yeah. It's just a description of the fact that fermions won't all occupy the same quantum state. They all have to be different.

Senan: So I'm just going to give you a very quick digression to explain one of the fundamental; although it has nothing to do with Bose-Einstein condensates, but it's just giving an example of how this exclusion principle of fermions actually affects things in the real world. As you're probably aware, electrons arrange themselves into shells around a nucleus.

Joe: No. [laughter]

Senan: You might think of it as orbits.

Joe: Ah, there we go, yes. That's better.

Senan: In physics they're called shells. But think of it like the orbits of the planets. So Mercury is in the closest orbit to the Sun, that'd be the near shell in towards the atom. And then Venus is in the next shell out, then Earth is in the next shell out after that, Mars is the next shell out and so on. So it's just like the orbits of the electrons.

Senan: And the reason that happens is because the electrons are being forced to jump; each shell has a higher energy level than the one before it. And because electrons are fermions, no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state, so some of them are forced out to a higher energy level which puts them into a higher shell.

Joe: Okay, so if you have an atom with several electrons they're all indifferent shells.

Senan: Some electrons can share the same shell because they're not in the same position.

Joe: Oh no, but the electrons though.

Senan: Imagine if Mercury had a partner planet that was going around the opposite side of the Sun from it, but in the same orbit.

Joe: Okay, that's possible.

Senan: It's the same kind of thing with atoms, but there's only so many of them will fit in the one shell because of other forces that are keeping them apart from each other. So that's a digression. Let's get back to Bose-Einstein condensates. So what do they do? They take a gas made from bosonic atoms. Atoms that are bosons because some atoms are bosons and some atoms are fermions. They take a gas made entirely of boson atoms and they cool it down to almost absolutez ero, like we're talking about the barest fraction of a degree above...

Joe: Just going back. So bosonic atoms; is like a secret organisation? Bosonic atoms, could they be any element? It's in a particular state?

Senan: Whether an atom is a boson or a fermion is determined by the number of electrons, neutrons, and protons that are in it. There's a formula that you can use with those three things, and depending on how many of those it has it will determine whether it's a boson or a fermion. In other words, whether it's happy to share the quantum state of its neighbours or not.

Senan: So in this case we're talking about bosons, the guys that get on with each other. You've got a gas made from them and you've cooled it down just a hair above absolute zero. What that does is it removes all the motion; the heat is what gives those particles their movement. So you get them down to what's called their ground state where all their motion is gone because you've taken away all their heat.

Senan: And because they're bosons, they all drop into the same quantum state then. So they act at the quantum level as if they really are a single atom. And instead of them all having their own individual separate quantum wave, all of which would be infinitesimally small, their quantum waves merge and they create just one big quantum wave that spans across the entire bunch of gas that you've got.

Senan: And that allows scientists to observe quantum activity at a larger scale where their instruments can actually detect it, whereas normally it's at such a small scale that nothing can detect it. By forcing the gas into this state, it allows them to observe quantum things happening.

Joe: Okay. I'm kind of getting it.

Senan: I kind of feel like there's a question coming after the okay.

Joe: No, I mean I'm desperately trying to think of a question, but I'm just imagining this, I don't know why, in a red plastic bucket. And at the bottom of the bucket there's a really thin layer of stuff that was all different a while ago and is now one thing.

Senan: And it's called quantum coherence. When they all coalesce into that standard state. So I'm going to give you an analogy that might help people to understand it.

Joe: Not me, but people. People who are listening.

Senan: Imagine synchronised swimmers in a swimming pool. And they're not synchronised. They're all swimming in their own different way. And you're an observer looking at them, you can't really see any pattern to how they're swimming. But suddenly if they all become synchronised swimmers, all doing the exact same thing, you can clearly see what the pattern of their swimming is.

Joe: Okay. So that's kind of the thing that's going on here with BECs,they're called. Bose-Einstein Condensates. Okay, you can use BECs for the rest of the episode.

Senan: Weirdly, for I do not understand how this works, but they have allowed scientists to slow light down to almost stopped. So light normally travels at 300,000 kilometres per second, but when they pass light through a Bose-Einstein condensate, they can slow it down to almost stopped.

Joe: I wonder did the guy who discovered that; he's there in the lab going, "Lads, look at this! What's the speed of light again? Can we just have a look at this?"

Senan: And there's a few other esoteric laboratory experiments that they make possible that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise, that we're going to move on from now because that's enough about BECs. And believe it or not, in comparison to what we're going to talk about next, for me anyway, Bose-Einstein condensates are relatively straight forward.

Joe: Right. If this is relatively straight forward, anybody who thinks that that's relatively straightforward, keep listening. Everybody else, come on, we're going for coffee.[laughter]

Senan: Right, supersolids. These are deeply weird, in fact mind-bending as far as I'm concerned. And again it's one of these things which there was a theory developed around about 1970 that maybe these might exist, but it was only 2017 before somebody actually managed to do it in a laboratory, and it's a really complicated set of conditions.

Joe: 10 years of absolute ridicule for the person, you know, 1970. "Guess what I've discovered!" "I don't think so. No, no, no."

Senan: That kind of thing has gone on in science an awful lot. So I wouldn't be one bit surprised if they got that kind of reaction when they suggested it. Anyway, the key thing about supersolids is the material they're made from is both solid and a superfluid at the same time. We spoke about superfluids last week. Now, just to clarify, it's not that it's flicking over and back between solid and superfluid.

Joe: Nice, it's not like you have ice in a bucket and you're refreezing it. No.

Senan: And it's not that some of it is solid and some of it is liquid. All of it is both solid and a superfluid at the same time. So imagine a sponge which has water soaked into it. Well imagine instead of water, the liquid that's soaked into the sponge is sponge!

Joe: It's sponge?

Senan: Yeah, so sponge is flowing through itself. It's just mind-boggling. I can't picture it.

Joe: I know. The Abyss. It's The Abyss. It's them dudes that came up from the bottom of the abyss and came into the ship with the faces, the liquid; the aliens. They're supersolids.

Senan: For those people who are under 40, The Abyss was a very good science fiction movie that was back out when we were young.

Joe: Less of the "we were young," please. Who was in it? Was Michael Douglas in it?

Senan: No. I can't remember. I can see the girl's face but I can't remember her name. Sharon Stone?

Joe: No. No, no, no.

Senan: Anyway. Never mind. We'll be here all day picking names.

Joe: We'll be doing our film podcast next week. [laughter]

Senan: It's the understanding of it, we're very much at early days. It's been proven under...

Joe: Oh yes we are! Very much. We are pre-early days here!

Senan: I mean it's been proven in laboratories that it exists, but I don't think anybody; it's a bit like I just made unobtainium. And speaking of unobtainium, we are going to move on to time crystals.

Joe: Oh yes!

Senan: Now, I've been struggling with trying to find a way to explain this that makes any sense.

Joe: You mean all the rest of that was clear to you? Wow!

Senan: Well at least most of the other stuff I can create some kind of picture in my mind of what it might be. Probably a completely erroneous picture, but at least I am grasping something in my mind.

Joe: So now we're going to attempt to explain something in the podcast that you don't have a clear idea about.

Senan: Well no, not even a vague idea.

Joe: This will be nonsense!

Senan: Let's just be honest. Right. Crystals. It's nothing to do with normal crystals. Time crystals, right? Normal crystals are things like salt or ice or metal or lots of other substances that are crystals. And what defines a crystal, as we mentioned last week, is the atoms are all lined up in a grid. So there's a lattice that they have all attached themselves to and they're in a very regular pattern and the pattern just keeps repeating through the material. So they're all locked into this grid position. Time crystals, nothing to do with that.

Joe: Okay. You can just ignore that last two minutes. [laughter]

Senan: The reason they're called crystals is because there's a concept I am only going to touch on, so please do not ask me questions about it!

Joe: Hold on, I've got a list!

Senan: In physics called symmetry. Now, there's two aspects to it. There's translational symmetry in space and translational symmetry in time.

Joe: Now, I know all about this.

Senan: You do?

Joe: No. I was looking forward to a break from speaking. I'm getting hoarse here. Please explain it to me.

Senan: So anyway, an ordinary crystal like ice or salt or whatever, without me going into too much detail...

Joe: Thank God.

Senan: It breaks the physics concept of translational symmetry in space because the atoms choose to be in particular places in the grid in the lattice that holds the crystal together. Whereas amorphous matter, that's matter that's not a crystal, the atoms don't choose to be in particular places like they do with a crystal.

Senan: Translational symmetry in time is what a time crystal does. And it's basically...

Joe: Just say that again.

Senan: Translational symmetry in time.

Joe: Oh God.

Senan: Is the concept behind time crystals. Very briefly, certain substances that are in certain conditions, when you cool them down to absolute zero, so all the energy is gone. Those particles should not be moving anymore. You've taken away all the energy like we said a moment ago. But yet, they don't do that. They start oscillating.

Senan: So if you look at it now, it's in position A. If you look at it a second from now, it's in position B. A second after that it's gone back to position A. So these particles start oscillating between two positions, and it's like they're choosing a moment in time to be one way, and a different moment in time to be a different way, even though there is no external energy which should be permitting them to do that. They shouldn't have the energy to do that, but yet they'll do it in certain circumstances.

Joe: But are they actually moving between the positions or are they just popping between like it's going, "I'm here, I'm over here, now I'm here, now I'm over here."

Senan: I don't know whether there's an actual journey taking place or whether we're in one place one moment and we're in another place a moment later.

Joe: It would make it no less amazing.

Senan: Yeah, it would. But the point about them is that there's no external energy going in at all which is normally required to make particles move, but yet these things will just go tick, tock, tick, tock, and keep doing that forever as long as you keep that material cold.

Joe: So why can't we use them for energy?

Senan: Because it's a locked internal system. It's different from say a quartz crystal in a watch; you know quartz crystals are in watches?

Joe: No. No I don't.

Senan: So every electric watch or every electric clock, the way it measures time is by the oscillation, the vibration of a quartz crystal. Quartz crystals vibrate at a very specific frequency that we know.

Joe: So a quartz crystal is a crystal. It's also a time crystal?

Senan: No. It is not a time crystal even though we are using it to tell time. I knew we'd get wrapped up in knots with this one! And we don't have the time to stay with it!

Joe: If we had a time crystal we could get through this bit! [laughter]

Senan: Anyway, the point about quartz crystals is because they vibrate at a very specific frequency we can measure that and then use it to calculate how long a second is, and that's how an electric watch works. The only reason that quartz crystal is vibrating is because we're putting electric current into either side of it. So we've connected it to a battery and that's making it vibrate. If we disconnect it from the battery, it stops vibrating.

Senan: Unlike our time crystal friend, not connected to anything, has no external source of energy, shouldn't have any internal energy left, and yet internally its particles are oscillating between two positions. So it's a weird one; the theory only came about in 2012 by a guy called Frank Wilczek who was a Nobel Laureate that it might be possible for this to happen. And it was only a few years ago, 2016 I think, four years after his theory came up that somebody finally managed to do it. But they had to create a really exotic set of conditions in a laboratory to actually do it.

Joe: Palm trees and sand...

Senan: And piña coladas. Anyway, we're going to move on to quark-gluon plasmas.

Joe: I actually don't think we should have a single podcast without quark-gluon plasmas in it somewhere. Just to be able to say it, "quark-gluon plasma."

Senan: Do you know it's actually easier to say than the acronym QGP.

Joe: QGP is kind of; yeah. It sounds like one of those things that people in the theatre should use to prepare before they go on stage. "Quark-gluon plasma, quark-gluon plasma."

Senan: Oh, before they go out and do Hamlet or something. Yes. Anyway, we spoke last week about the fourth state of matter which is like a normal plasma, which all the stars and the Sun and lightning and everything are made from. This is a different beast altogether. But the way you create it is kind of similar in that normal plasma, when you add enough heat into a gas, the electrons gain enough energy from that that they can break away from the nuclei of the atoms that they're normally orbiting around. So they're kind of gone off on their own, the electrons. That's a normal plasma.

Joe: I love we've got to the stage of this podcast where that's normal. That's the normal plasma. Now we're onto the crazy stuff!

Senan: So, a quark-gluon plasma. Protons in the nucleus of atoms are made up of quarks and gluons. The quarks are like the building blocks and they are glued together by the gluons, which are effectively what they call the strong nuclear force. It's the strongest force ever detected in nature, is the strong nuclear force when they calculate the strength of it. And as a result of that, you never really see quarks outside of protons. They're always inside as a building block. They're never outside on their own running around.

Senan: Except in a quark-gluon plasma. So if you keep adding heat until it becomes a phenomenal temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius; I don't know about you, but that means nothing to me.

Joe: Well I mean the person who came up with it is like, "Not 3 trillion, not 3.5 trillion. We need 4 trillion degrees."

Senan: It's exactly that. Let's just put a little bit of context on it to make it specific. It's about 250,000 times hotter than the core of our Sun. Soi t's pretty warm. Anyhow, you've now given the quarks enough energy once you get to that temperature that they can overwhelm the strong force. They can actually break away a bit like the electrons broke away a long time ago. The quarks are now able to overcome the strong force and break away and suddenly you've got this soup of free quarks that are outside protons swimming around.

Joe: Yeah, well I imagine there's no protons.

Senan: No, the protons have been de-protonised. They've been de-quarked. However, we'll never as humans ever, ever... there's no chance whatsoever we will create this in a laboratory.

Joe: And this is one of the very few times on this podcast where Senan is 100% sure of something. Absolutely certain. This is never going to; you know like go down to the bookies now and put money on it. Right? Never going to happen that we're going to get to 4 trillion degrees Celsius.

Senan: It's theorised that it happened for a brief fraction of a second just after the Big Bang. Less than a second after the Big Bang, all of the matter in the universe was together in this tight ball, pinhead sized probably. And it had so much heat at that point that for a very brief fraction of a second there was a quark-gluon plasma. It cooled by the time a second had elapsed, and we were back to normal protons and normal matter.

Joe: Well, or they were there for the first time, surely.

Senan: Yeah, they were there for the first time.

Joe: You would imagine because we've no idea what happened before the Big Bang, so maybe they were there before the Big Bang. Who knows? Right, we're going to...

Senan: That's another episode. We're going to move on to our last topic. And this has to do with what happens when stars die.

Joe: A happy topic to end on!

Senan: And what happens when a star dies really depends on the size of it.So if it's greater than maybe two and a half times the size of our sun in terms of its weight, its mass, it's probably going to form a black hole. If it's a bit less than that, it's probably going to form a neutron star, which is what we want to talk about. We're talking about neutron degenerate matter here.

Senan: So you kind of have to understand what's going on with a star. You've got two competing forces that are balanced. On the one hand, remember stars are really, really big.

Joe: Gotcha. Finally I understand something. I'm going to write that down. Stars are really, really big.

Senan: Yeah, yeah. In fact you could probably use a third really if you wanted to. So for example, our sun has more mass in it than absolutely everything else in the solar system combined. The sun is much bigger than all the other stuff in the solar system. And the more stuff you have in one place,the stronger the gravity. So you've got this really strong gravity trying to squeeze it into a smaller and smaller space. Just its own gravity.

Senan: But you have already squeezed it enough for fusion to start. Now we did an episode on fusion there a while ago so I'm not going to go into that, but the pressure that has been caused by this gravity squeezing has ignited fusion, and the fusion is creating outward pressure. The energy produced by the fusion is creating outward pressure and you've got this fine balance between the gravity squeezing in and the energy pushing out from the fusion.

Senan: That's all very well until you run out of fuel.

Joe: Which is very topical at the moment!

Senan: It certainly is. It runs out of fuel more or less instantly. One minute it's there, the next minute it's not. And suddenly gravity wins and the star undergoes a massive collapse. A really violent, sudden, fast collapse because the fuel of fusion has run out. There is so much force, violence involved that the electrons which should be orbiting around the nucleus of the atoms are forced into the protons that are in the nucleus. So you have electrons that bash into protons and when they merge they actually become a neutron. So what was an electron and a proton, bashed in together and they form a neutron.

Senan: You've now got a situation where practically all of the matter, or most of it anyway, that was that star is now just neutrons. Nothing but neutrons. It's a really weird state of matter. Practically every other form of matter we know, you have electrons, protons, and neutrons together forming atoms. Here you've just got a pile of neutrons. And they're really squished in dense together. It collapses down in size quite a lot. Our sun is hundreds of thousands of kilometres in diameter. But if it was to turn into a neutron star,it would only be about 20 kilometres in diameter.

Joe: No need to be specific!

Senan: All that material gets squished down into a very, very small space. Incredible density. If you could find a teaspoon strong enough and lift up a teaspoon of it, it would weigh around about 6 billion tons, which is about the weight of a mountain.

Joe: On a teaspoon. A mountain on a teaspoon.

Senan: Yeah, a mountain. And now we need to go back to our friend that we mentioned at the start of the show, the Pauli exclusion principle.

Joe: Look at that, it's almost like he's planned this!

Senan: So neutrons are fermions. So that means they won't all occupy the same quantum state. So the ones in the middle that first become neutrons in the middle of the neutron star, maybe they're going not very fast. But the next layer out is forced by the exclusion principle to go a little bit faster because if it didn't it would be occupying the same quantum state as the ones inside it. So the next layer out must travel a bit faster.

Joe: So in order to avoid being in the same quantum state they increase acceleration?

Senan: Speed. Speed they're travelling at. And as layers and layers and layers of neutrons build up away from the core of the neutron star, each layer has to travel faster than the one before it.

Joe: So now I'm imagining; because initially when you said the star collapses I just saw this big dense black thing solid thing there. But it's all whizzing at unbelievable speeds.

Senan: Yeah. Now remember we are talking about subatomic particles here. So their motion is probably random in all kinds of different directions.

Joe: So it's not like whizzing around, you're not going to see...

Senan: It is rotating for a different reason, but not because of the motion of the neutrons. The different reason it's rotating is because practically every star system we've ever observed is rotating. So the planets in our solar system are rotating around the sun and the sun itself is rotating in the same direction. And it's the same pretty much with all stars.

Senan: So when you collapse the diameter of the star that maybe was rotating at; we'll say the star was rotating at 100 kilometres an hour. If you collapse that big huge diameter of a star down to something that's only 20 kilometres, it accelerates the rotation. So yes, they're spinning really fast but not because of the neutrons. As I say, as the layers of neutrons are building up, each layer is getting faster and faster and faster.

Senan: Now earlier on I mentioned that if a star was more than two and a half times the mass of our sun, it's probably going to end up a black hole. The reason for that is that eventually you reach a point where the outer layers of neutrons are being forced to travel at the speed of light.

Joe: Which is not possible.

Senan: Which is not possible. And it means that the Pauli exclusion principle is overcome by the speed of light. So eventually you break the Pauli exclusion principle and that causes the whole thing to collapse into a blackhole.

Joe: Ouch!

Senan: So that's neutron stars. I mean they're pretty amazing. And here's an interesting Irish connection. So there's a particular class of neutron stars called pulsars. And they are spinning very fast and out of the poles are these beams of intense radiation, like a laser beam, like a pencil pointing out of each north pole, south pole of the star. And a lot of them would be, as well as spinning, they'd be wobbling a bit. And that would mean that the beam would briefly sweep across Earth. And it does that because the thing is rotating at a very specific constant velocity, it sweeps across Earth maybe once every three seconds.

Joe: Like a lighthouse.

Senan: Yeah, like a lighthouse. Maybe once every three seconds, bip, bip, bip. And that's how they became known as pulsars because they were reliably hitting Earth for a moment every minute or every minute and a half, each pulsar has a different interval.

Joe: Surely the time would be longer than... no?

Senan: It depends. Some of them are spinning ridiculously fast, hundreds of times per second. So the time varies quite a lot. But an Irish lady, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a physicist discovered pulsars. She was in one of the universities in Britain, I think it might have been Cambridge. But yeah, she was the one that discovered pulsars. So it's nice to have an Irish connection at the end of our story. That's the end of our tour through weird and exotic states of matter.

Joe: You really enjoyed that!

Senan: Well look, why can't you know...

Joe: I mean you normally enjoy the content of the podcast, but it's just when you get to the very edge of what we can understand that you get completely animated and go, "Look, I have something; I have no idea what's going to happen. I'm going to try and explain this."

Senan: Isn't it pretty amazing though all the stunning things that are happening in the universe that are so far beyond our understanding?

Joe: What amazes me is that mathematics leads to so much of it. You know, it leads to all the little symbols and pluses and minuses and entire books full of this and they can decide that at a very fundamental level...

Senan: For me the genius of those guys like Einstein is they have a blackboard full of equations and they're able to draw conclusions from that. They're able to say that mathematics means that this physical thing must be happening. I mean, that's pretty amazing to me.

Joe: And then to have people to go out and go, "Okay, am I going to prove this? Or maybe disprove it." Maybe they set out to disprove it and then went, "Oh wait a minute."

Senan: I'm sure there's physicists that several times have said to themselves, "Oh no, Einstein was right again!"

Joe: I don't believe it! I do not believe it! Well, we hope you enjoyed that little trip through the crazy states of matter.

Senan: Yeah. That's enough exoticism for one podcast I think.

Joe: Okay, so thanks for listening. I'm Joe.

Senan: And check us out on enoughwiththescience.com. I'm Senan, goodbye.