This is an I-Hart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

People have wanted to know the answer to the question, what is the universe made of

since we've been asking questions about anything?

It seems a reasonable thing to want to know

the answer to. What am I made of? What are you made of? What are kittens made of? Lava or stars?

Around us, we see an incredible complexity. We want to know if there's a simple explanation for this

glorious universe.

Does it have some kind of basic bits, a small number of which interact in complex ways,

so that from their towing and froing emerges all of the complexity of chemistry and biology?

We've made some good progress on that question, and we now know that you and I and kittens

are made of three kinds of particles, of corks, down quarks, and electrons, and in basically

the same proportion. What makes you, you, and what makes lava, is not the bits they're made

of, but how they're put together. You are your arrangement of particles.

And we figured most of that out by doing something pretty simple. Take this stuff around us,

usually electrons or protons, and smash it together to study what comes out. And we found

all sorts of exotic matter, muons, other quarks, higgs bosons, stuff that isn't part of the atom.

But what if we flipped the script and smashed some of that exotic matter together?

What could come out? What might we learn? How could we even do that?

We're going to dive into all that today on the episode.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily smashy universe.

Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith.

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