Basement: Daniel Whiteson | CERN, Dark Matter, and the Aliens Next Door

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

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. 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.

Anyway, this was a lot of fun. Let's go down to the basement.

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Daniel, welcome to the basement.

Daniel Whiteson (2:20)

Thank you very much for having me. So excited to talk to you about all of this crazy stuff in science.

SPEAKER_2 (2:24)

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?

Daniel Whiteson (2:42)

A killer Nutella nut roll?

SPEAKER_2 (2:45)

I mean, I heard that you have a strong baking game.

Daniel Whiteson (2:48)

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.

SPEAKER_2 (3:05)

What is it? What's the cookie?

Daniel Whiteson (3:07)

It's chocolate chip oatmeal cookies with tahini. That's the key.

SPEAKER_2 (3:12)

That's the key?

Daniel Whiteson (3:13)

Absolutely. I love tahini.

I'm a sucker for halva or anything with tahini and sesame seeds. That's my kryptonite.

SPEAKER_2 (3:20)

We're going to try that. I always heard that baking is science.

Daniel Whiteson (3:26)

Yeah. It's chemistry, right? Yeah. There's transformation, things change phase. It's incredible what happens there. And it's a great example of like 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, what's happening with all the baking powder and the vinegar and 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 like experience on the macroscopic scale. And then there's like all this stuff happening underneath.

SPEAKER_2 (4:03)

Were you baking before you became a scientist? Or did you say, you know what? I've got an idea.

Daniel Whiteson (4:11)

I've got a sweet tooth.

SPEAKER_2 (4:12)

Okay.

Daniel Whiteson (4:13)

And I love gluten.

SPEAKER_2 (4:14)

Who doesn't? I'm baking forever.

Daniel Whiteson (4:15)

I know gluten is God's gift to humanity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (4:20)

All right. Another question that I need to know.

What's your favorite video game that you programmed?

Daniel Whiteson (4:29)

That I programmed.

SPEAKER_2 (4:30)

That you programmed. Didn't you? You were a coder.

Daniel Whiteson (4:33)

I am a coder. I was a coder. I started programming in BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20, right?

SPEAKER_2 (4:39)

Same.

Daniel Whiteson (4:40)

Tiny amount of RAM and you stored your programs on cassette tapes.

SPEAKER_2 (4:44)

Yes.

Daniel Whiteson (4:45)

Yeah. I'm an OG programmer. I remember when my dad brought home our first computer, transformational for me.

And yeah, I wrote Tic Tac Toe. It was my first game.