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

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]If you could speak to an oracle, or to God, or to advanced aliens, and they give you one one opportunity to learn something about the universe. Everybody has a question that they want to know the answer to. My question is, what is everything made out of? Today we're talking with Professor Daniel Whiteson.

[00:00:15]He's a particle physicist at UC Irvine, an active researcher at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, where 5,000 scientists are using the biggest machine ever built to reveal the secrets of the universe.

[00:00:26]Daniel co-hosts the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, and he co-created Eleanor Wonders Why, an award-winning [music] science show for preschoolers. I'm hoping today Daniel will address the biggest mystery of all, where is the number four?

[00:00:42]What's it like at CERN? It is the center of the world for particle physics. It's like the nerd capital of the world. You know, when the machine is running, you never know what day is going to be the day you make a discovery. Every 24 nanoseconds, we read out 100 million channels of data about the collision. So much that we have to throw most of it away. Why do you throw it away? Because you already know what it is, or because It's too much to ever analyze. How do you know you're not throwing out the next Nobel Prize? We just can't keep all of it. It's just too much data. We're talking about petabytes and petabytes every day. So there's a philosopher out there, Hartry Field, and he wrote a book called Science Without Numbers. And his basic premise is >> [music] >> fields aren't real.

[00:01:30]They're not real.

[00:01:31]>> They're not real. They don't exist.

[00:01:33]And he goes further than that. He says, "Numbers aren't real." What? What? What does that even mean? You don't need fields. You don't even need numbers.

[00:01:42]>> Is it true that fields prove Newtonian gravity [music] without numbers? Yeah, this book rederives Newtonian gravity without any numbers.

[00:01:50]>> That's bananas.

[00:01:51]>> Yeah, and it works. [music] Can you tell me about how we can turn every cell phone on Earth into a cosmic ray [music] detector? Your phone is effectively a particle detector. How does that work?

[00:02:02]Well, it has a camera in it, sure. And what is a camera other than a particle detector? [music] And these days, cameras are little CMOS chips. They're these little piece of silicon. When a photon comes through, it liberates [music] a bunch of particles, and then it gets read out.

[00:02:15]>> Yep. If a muon goes through, same thing happens.

[00:02:19]>> It does?

[00:02:19]>> Absolutely. In fact, we use the same technology to detect particles at the Large Hadron Collider. You have 50 million phones, you have 100 million phones, you have a billion phones.

[00:02:29]>> Sure. You could do cosmic ray physics the way nobody has ever done before. You could see these things at a higher rate.

[00:02:34]You could figure out where they're coming from in the sky. If you gave me 100 billion dollars, I could build you a collider that would reveal secrets of the universe. We just have to do [music] it. I believe in America. I believe in humanity. I believe in people. I believe in smarts. We should invest in ourselves by spending money on basic research.

[00:02:51]It's the best investment you can make.

[00:02:53]Honestly, and the more we learn about the universe, and I don't mean that as just a [music] as a fortune cookie. I mean, the more we actually learn, the fewer conflicts we're going to have.

[00:03:03]Yeah.