7 hours ago
S3E09 - Subatomic (Atoms)
#Subatomic #GeniusGames #ParticlePhysics #BigBang #BoardGames #Science #SciComm
Summary
We're going back to the Big Bang, baby! This week we talk about Subatomic, an deck-building game by Genius Games where you're assembling atoms out of their constituent particles. We're joined by the amazing Kelly Weinersmith and Daniel Whiteson (of Daniel & Kelly's Extraordinary Universe), and we talk about quarks, gluons, photons, boron, the Big Bang, dark matter, and all sort of other particle physics mashup. So join us as we get on top of it all (or maybe to the bottom, or maybe just charmingly strange) in this episode of Gaming with Science.
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introductions
- 06:06 Vaccination and dark matter
- 12:35 Subatomic gameplay
- 20:59 Playing the Big Bang
- 24:16 Atoms, protons, and quarks (oh my)!
- 35:57 Big Bang Boron and Beryllium
- 38:44 The Transparent Universe
- 42:46 Nitpick corner
- 47:17 Final grades
- 50:25 Signoffs
Links
- Subatomic (Genius Games official site)
- Daniel & Kelly's Extraordinary Universe (Apple Podcasts)
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, (Comic by Kelly's more-famous husband)
- Vaccination and cowpox (Wikipedia)
- And an article saying that the real story may be more complex (Boylston 2013, Pubmed Central)
- Potential signal of dark matter hitting xenon (Science Daily)
- Everyone Else Thinks this Game is Awesome (Kelly & Zach's trivia game)
Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net
This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Full Transcript
(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Jason 0:06
Hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Brian 0:12
Today, we're going to discuss Subatomic by Genius Games.
Brian 0:20
Hey, welcome back to Gaming with Science. This is Brian. This is Jason, and we have a pair of fantastic guests today: Daniel Whiteson and Kelly Weinersmith. Could you please introduce yourselves, and then I'm going to tell our listeners why they should be excited about this if they are not already.
Daniel 0:36
Hi, everyone. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm not a fan of chemistry.
Kelly 0:42
Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space, and I'm also not a huge fan of chemistry. But I'm excited to talk about our game today.
Daniel 0:50
We have common ground.
Brian 0:51
I think you guys are in luck because actually, while this game builds itself as chemistry, I don't personally see it. I think chemistry requires interactions between atoms, and we don't really get any of that here?
Kelly 1:01
It has more of a physics vibe, in my opinion.
Brian 1:03
Yes, very much. First of all, you guys release a twice weekly science communication podcast, Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, which is very good. You guys do lots of listener questions. Also, I do love that both of your spouses are recurring characters in the podcast. Daniel, your wife is a microbiologist, and I got really excited. I thought she might have been a plant microbiologist, but she's not. She does human microbiome work, right?
Daniel 1:28
She does, yes.
Brian 1:29
Okay, so unlike
Daniel 1:30
Kelly's spouse, we're mostly complimentary towards my spouse because she deserves it. And you know, I'll leave it at that. Oh, slice!
Brian 1:40
And Kelly's spouse is a internet cartoonist of some renown, Zach Weinersmith, creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which is one of the nerdier web comics I think out there. It's certainly you know up on the Mount Rushmore of nerdy web comics for sure, alongside XKCD and PhD Comics, and maybe there are some others that need to be mentioned there, but those are the three that come to my mind. Daniel, you had a previous podcast with Jorge Cham, author and creator of PhD Comics, and I remember Kelly as a regular contributor to the science sort of extended universe. You guys had your own podcast too, the Weekly Wiener Smith, and I still remember you horrified physicist Ben Tippett with a race through external genitalia in the animal kingdom.
Kelly 2:29
I believe I don't remember that. I believe it. I probably mortified Ben Tippett many times. I really adore Ben. He's wonderful, but I probably yeah I believe that.
Brian 2:40
I bet you Ben remembers it. He probably does.
Kelly 2:44
Poor Ben. I put him through a lot.
Daniel 2:48
Nobody forgets meeting Kelly Weinersmith. That's they try best possible way. Sure, sure. After years of therapy, still nobody could forget.
Brian 2:58
Do you guys have a favorite game? Doesn't have to be a board game.
Daniel 3:00
Oh yeah,
Brian 3:01
or just a game you really like, because favorite tends to be like, well, I can't choose my favorite child, or Kelly's case, goat. So
Kelly 3:09
I have human children as well that I like, but I talk about them less.
Daniel 3:15
One of my favorite games is called Bonanza. It's a game where you plant beans and you build like a bean garden, yeah. And it's really fun, mostly because of the trading. So the human aspect of like, you know, I'll trade two green beans for your three blue beans. Like, no, you screwed me in the last deal. I'm going to trade over here. Or when Katrina plays, she's incapable of being competitive with our children, so she's always like, here, just take some beans. She's in real life trying to get people to eat beans anyway, so it always leads to lots of laughs and sometimes tears. And I think that makes the best game-the crying. Oh wow!
Kelly 3:53
Like this is deep insight into Daniel's psyche here.
Brian 3:57
So this is Beananza or Bonanza. Bonanza. Why is it about beans?
Daniel 4:02
Well, I think it's a German game, so I think I don't know why they call it that. Okay, but it's really fun. Totally, totally recommended for people.
Brian 4:11
Nice, thank you. What about you, Kelly? What do you play?
Kelly 4:14
Well, so despite what we said earlier or what Daniel said earlier, I am a pretty big fan of my husband. He's a he's a good guy. We didn't say anything different. When when we lived in Alabama, we used to play a lot of games, but he has a bit of a competitive streak, and I made the mistake. We got a like queen king's hat for whoever won, and then the hat that said loser for whoever lost. He made it worse. We did, and then he really leaned into like being kind of a jerk when we were playing, and so I got a little bit less excited about playing with him. But but my favorite game is Pandemic. But I don't play games with him very often because things are a little tense in our house afterwards.
Brian 4:51
But Pandemic's a cooperative game. How does it get tense? How do you get competitive with Pandemic?
Jason 4:55
Like there is no like either you all win or you all lose. So how does that?
Kelly 5:00
I think Zach doesn't care if we all win or we all lose, as long as he was the one who looks the best. So he finds a way.
Daniel 5:08
That's so on brand.
Daniel 5:09
I remember the first time he was on the podcast. I introduced him as Kelly's husband, and he said, "Ha ha, that's only funny because I'm much more famous than Kelly." Yeah, it's not my world.
Kelly 5:21
He's pretty. Thank you, thank you. He's pretty competitive. Yeah. But but but I'm glad to be with you all today talking about games without Zach around.
Brian 5:30
Do you guys ever play Terraforming Mars? Was that any inspiration for Kelly and Zach wrote a book on the city on Mars. Very good. I'm a huge fan of that book as well.
Kelly 5:39
No, we didn't. We you know, we read like Kim Stanley Robinson's, you know, Mars trilogy, but we didn't end up playing Terraforming Mars. We've been told that we need to, but like when we wrote that book, it was a pandemic, and life was just absolutely crazy. And frankly, there wasn't a lot of fun during that time, so we didn't stop to play the game. Unfortunately,
Brian 5:56
I do like the idea of like probably if you're stuck at home playing a game with a very competitive spouse sounds like not a good way to spend the rest of your day.
Kelly 6:03
Yeah, we we avoided stuff like that.
Brian 6:06
All right. Well, let's do science banter. We usually let our guests go first, so sometimes people bring things that are on theme for the game that we're playing. Sometimes they don't. I'm going to let Kelly go first because I want to hear more about squishy biology.
Kelly 6:20
Well, so Daniel and I had the amazing opportunity to interview Lindsey Fitzharris on our show recently. The episode's not going to come out till October, but she wrote this great book about the physician that Sherlock Holmes is actually based on. Like Arthur Conan Doyle went to med school. He had a doctor named Joseph Bell who like was really good at looking at the patients and figuring out exactly you know like where they came from, what they were sick with, what their careers were, and he said this method was quote elementary. But she came on the show and she reminded me of a great fact, and that's going to be the fact that I share, and that is the word vaccine comes from the word vacca, which means cow, because the first vaccines created by Jenner were using cowpox to treat smallpox. So Jenner noticed that milkmaids who were like milking cows would get these poxes on their body, but then they didn't end up getting smallpox. And it turned out this closely related disease in cows protected humans from smallpox. So he started infecting people with cowpox and protected them from smallpox, and eventually we used this to wipe smallpox off the face of the planet in the 1980s, which is one of my absolute favorite things that humans have done because it required a lot of coordination. Yay, vaccine! Yay, extinction!
Jason 7:34
Yeah, well, some things we're okay with extincting. Amen, amen.
Brian 7:40
I do think it's interesting looking back at that history that, believe it or not, a lot of the sort of same anti-vax arguments that we have now were there then, even when people were dying in droves. It's so surprising and hard to understand sometimes. But you know, anyway, but vaccines are great. They work great. They are safe. They are effective.
Kelly 7:59
Yay! And they're way better than smallpox.
Brian 8:01
They're way better than dying.
Daniel 8:04
I love that story because it highlights the sort of random nature of science. You know, if they, for example, had not used cows, if they had used like horses, would we all be calling vaccines like I don't know what cavex scenes or something like after caballo, and would anti-vaxxers be like anti-cabaxers or something?
Brian 8:22
We want to talk about weird names. We're going to get into that with subatomic.
Daniel 8:27
No, yes, yes, lots of material there.
Brian 8:29
So, Daniel, what did you bring to share with the class today?
Daniel 8:32
So today's game is all about subatomic: how to build normal matter. But normal matter is a tiny fraction of the universe. Most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, which we know is there, and we see it gravitate and shapes the whole universe. But we don't know what it's made out of. But just this week, we saw the first hint of a potential observation of a dark matter particle. A huge lab underground in in I think it's South Dakota has a vast tank of xenon, and they saw a one xenon atom get kicked in exactly the way you would expect if it was dark matter. And it's very hard to explain in any other way. So it's not definitive, but it's very intriguing. Maybe first evidence. It could be like in a few years we have a collection of these things, and this is the first one. Or it could be that it was nothing, and it just goes away. But it's an exciting week in understanding what the universe is made out of.
Brian 9:30
So it kicked a xenon atom. I didn't think that dark matter could kick anything. I thought that was the whole thing with dark matter.
Daniel 9:36
Yeah. Well, dark matter. We know it feels gravity. We don't know if it has any other forces. I've never seen it interact in any other way. But you're right. This whole experiment assumes that dark matter can interact with xenon in some non-gravitational way. So not only would this be the discovery of dark matter if it's real, but it might also be the discovery of a new dark force that lets dark matter. Interact with normal matter, and forever will it dominate our destiny.
Brian 10:05
Another flavor of dark, so dark energy, dark matter, and dark strange energies. Oh, we'll do strange energies like from Star Trek, right?
Jason 10:12
I was going to say we really need to come up with some new adjectives to add on to it. They just can't all be dark.
Kelly 10:18
Daniel and I have this
Daniel 10:19
moist. How about moist? Oh no, no, damp energy, dank, dank energy. For those who ripped the bong before listening to this podcast.
Brian 10:31
Well, if that holds up, that looks like that's that's a Nobel Prize worthy discovery. If true, absolutely,
Daniel 10:37
yes, that would change the game forever.
Brian 10:39
That's crazy.
Kelly 10:40
Daniel has a long history of being invited to work on projects and then turning those projects down, and then they win the Nobel Prize. And so, my question for Daniel is: Were you asked to work on this project? You were.
Daniel 10:53
I definitely had the opportunity to work on this and said no. Which you know, that's the way you win the Nobel Prize. Yeah, is Daniel saying this is never going to work?
Kelly 11:06
And then it does. Oh no, that's three now, Daniel. Yeah,
Brian 11:11
that's really cool, though. Not that you didn't work on it, but just that that the first indicator. That's really neat. All right, do you guys want to talk about a board game?
Kelly 11:19
Wait, don't you share a fact? No, no, no!
Brian 11:21
I don't have to share facts. That's what you guys have to do. Usually, it's Jason's job.
Jason 11:25
Yeah, Brian's sharing the game, so he'll be talking plenty.
Kelly 11:28
Okay, okay.
Brian 11:28
I mean, I could come up with something. I kind of I was already telling them about onion and garlic chemistry, but Jason's heard that literally 100 times, so I don't think he needs to hear it again. And there was a a long period on the podcast where every one of my facts, I was trying to tie it back to onion or sulfur chemistry in some way. Like asteroids stink like sulfur, like stink like old onions because of some of the chemicals that accumulate on them. Armpit sweat uses a similar chemistry. There's something for your wife, Daniel, on the the armpit microbiome. There are specific enzymes that break down alcohols that are very similar to the. I could go on and on.
Jason 12:01
Yeah, we should probably go on to the game.
Daniel 12:03
I'm not sure how I feel about you linking armpits with my wife.
Kelly 12:09
We had her on the show to talk about stink and the world of the microbiome. That's not fair.
Daniel 12:13
It might be the least gross thing she works on, actually. Yeah. Well, she has some new project to deal with the vaginal microbiome that involves lasers. I was like,
Brian 12:24
okay, that sounds bad.
Kelly 12:27
She talked about it on our show. It makes sense
Jason 12:28
as long as there's informed consent.
Daniel 12:30
Informed consent, exactly.
Brian 12:35
All right, do you guys want to talk about a game? Yes, yes. Okay, let's do it. So, Subatomic is was released in 2018. It's actually one of the earlier games that were put out by Genius Games, so they are really specialists in this space of creating sort of hard, science accurate games for the hobby gamer. The lead designer is John Coveyou who is the lead designer on the vast majority of their games and also their CEO. So he is a their founder. He is basically has his fingers on a lot of the things that they come out with. It's for two to four players, so this is earlier than the thing where every board game had to have a solo game. So this actually, you got to have at least another person to play with. But 40 to 60 minutes and 14 and up, and again, your experience with your own 14-year-olds may vary. Subatomic is a deck-building game, so what that means is it's a game where you're going to start with every player when you're going to sit down, you start with a starting hand, and in that hand you're going to have a couple of photon cards, specifically gamma ray photons, four up quarks and four down quarks. Everybody starts the same way,
Jason 13:36
and so we will talk more about what these are later. But suffice to say, they're sort of like some of the fundamental building blocks of matter as we know it.
Brian 13:43
So you have a card that represents those. So the player every time you're going to draw a hand of five cards, and you're going to use them to do a couple different things. You can use them to make a subatomic particle in your atom, right? You can combine. I'm going to get this. It's two ups and one down to make a proton, two downs and one up to make a neutron, and then to make an electron, you have to slam two gamma ray photons together to get your electron.
Daniel 14:08
Am I allowed to do science quibbling yet, or is that later?
Brian 14:10
We have a section for that, but you you go right ahead if you want to pop something in now.
Daniel 14:15
Well, that part really puzzled me. I get how you put quarks together to make protons and neutrons, but like the electron is not made of two gammas. No, that just yeah, that's not okay. Not at all.
Brian 14:28
Super excited to hear about it when we get to that point.
Jason 14:30
Yeah, and then listeners, again, we'll be talking a lot more of the detail of the science part of this. But presumably, you remember from high school chemistry: protons, neutrons, electrons. Those are the bits that make up the atom.
Brian 14:42
These are the bits that everybody learns first before we learn about all the other things that they're made of, right? So you can use your cards to do a couple of things. You can use them directly to make subatomic particles. You're kind of like building them up into an atom mat in front of you. You can also use them to buy other cards. So basically, you can spend your quarks to buy. A proton or a neutron card that goes into your deck, so you're sort of improving the subatomic particle content of your deck as you go. Eventually, you can also buy more complex cards, so you can buy a card that's like two protons, or a proton and a neutron, or two protons and some energy. And then there's also the very rare and very powerful two neutrons, two protons. So just a the free helium nuclei that you can buy, and there's only a couple of those in the game. They're quite coveted. I know Jason and I were fighting over them.
Jason 15:27
It's also expensive though because the other resource in the game is energy, and that's the one card you actually have to pay energy to use. So very powerful, but also quite expensive.
Brian 15:37
Whenever you play your cards, you can also play them face down for energy. You just get to take a little energy token that you can use to power other things. Once you've built up your atom with enough subatomic particles, you then spend some energy and you get to claim that element. You claim the element card. So effectively, it's saying you made this nucleus. You made the nucleus of this element at this point that earns you points based on the atomic weight of the element. You also get to place two goal markers on other elements. Those will earn you like bonus points at the end of the game. The last thing you could do with your energy is buy one of seven scientists cards. You only use four per game, so you're going to exclude three of them. You're supposed to just do that randomly, and you add those to your deck, and they have special abilities. So, for instance, one of them has an ability where you play it, you can mimic any particle card that's out on the table, like one time, or you can look at your opponent's hands, or you can do some other fun stuff. So, we've got Marie Curie for radioactivity, Joseph Thomson, the discoverer of the electron and of the creator of the first atomic model, Ernst Rutherford, that the nucleus had high mass and positive charge. Niels Bohr, so electron orbitals. Albert Einstein, particle wave duality. Erwin Schrödinger, who the famous killer of hypothetical cats. Maria Goeppert Meyer developed a nuclear shell model. So, okay, every one of them has an ability. As near as I can tell, there is no connection between their contribution to physics and what their cards let you do, as far as I can tell. Maybe a more nuanced understanding of particle physics and the connections would be more obvious. There's one other exception, and that's Paul Dirac. So he sits on the board; he's not a card, and he lets you use the ability called annihilate, where you pay energy and you get to remove two cards from your deck. So two weaker cards, you just take them out of the game, so that you can have like a more slimmed down, powerful deck of cards. I do think it's odd that you pay energy to annihilate cards instead of getting energy from annihilating cards, but whatever.
Jason 17:35
That's one of those acceptable breaks to make the game work.
Brian 17:38
I'm wondering about the balance of that because again, it's like it seems like there's quite the trade-off to I need to get rid of cards. Oh, I'm going to get a little bit of energy for it because energy is hard to get. Like you said, is that's about everything in terms of the mechanics of the game. It's surprisingly elegant, very fun, very quick playing. I know we were both thinking this is one of their earliest games, so okay, what are we in for? Is this going to be kind of crude, but no, it's actually kind of you understand how they sort of established a niche in the space with this game.
Daniel 18:07
Despite violating conservation of charge.
Brian 18:09
Yes,
Jason 18:11
yeah, and so I notice with it that it gets a it starts a little slow, which is common for most deck builders. So if you haven't played a deck builder game, the basic idea is you start with a bunch of weak cards, and to use those and whatever other resources you have to gradually put stronger and better cards in your deck, so that by the end of the game you're able to do much more powerful things because you are drawing much more powerful cards in order to pull it off. And so most of them tend to start a little slow, but then they accelerate fast, and so by the end you're just kind of racing because you're all just popping off left and right in terms of being able to do stuff, and this is what Brian and I did. And actually, I was surprised because having played several of these before, I've figured out there's there's certain commonalities like that ability to get rid of cards in your deck is usually quite powerful. So I was shotgunning that and trying to make it more difficult for Brian to do that, and yet Brian actually beat me by a few points.
Brian 19:03
But we've already discussed this. This is because I didn't explain the bonus scoring rules properly.
Jason 19:07
That is part of it.
Kelly 19:10
Sounds like a little bit of cheating, maybe.
Brian 19:12
Let's say unintentional cheating.
Kelly 19:14
Okay. Yeah,
Jason 19:15
we have said like as long as everyone's playing by the same wrong rules, it's usually okay. The joy of a board game. Yeah. So the cost of that was actually pretty high, and so even though I was slimming my deck down and trying to make it a lean, mean like atom-building machine, and Brian wasn't, Brian ended up because since you can always liquidate extra cards for energy, he ended up with tons of energy and was able to use that to get some pretty powerful cards out of it instead, and so I was actually impressed that two like directly opposite strategies actually managed to keep it kind of neck and neck throughout the game. And I think that's a good a good indication of game balance is when you don't have to do the one thing; you can have two or three equally valid options to follow.
Brian 19:59
I ended. Up, so Jason was buying all those expensive cards, and then I had the ones, the Maria Goeppert card, Goeppert Meyer card that let me copy his cards. So I actually ended up benefiting from his effort. Yay! That's called collaboration, right, Jason?
Jason 20:15
No, I think Kelly can talk about this. That's called parasitism. I'm on Jason's side, I think. Yeah, when only one member of the pair benefits, that's that's a parasite, Brian. Not a mutualism.
Kelly 20:26
off of the work of the other, yeah.
Jason 20:28
Anyway, but yeah, I think that basically covers the game in terms of like how to play it. And you, I like what you said. This game bills itself as a game about chemistry, but it isn't really because there is no chemistry going on. Chemistry, as we understand it, it has to do with like the combining of atoms into molecules and the sharing of electrons and such. None of that happens here. We're all doing like nuclear. I guess technically nuclear chemistry, but that's not how most people understand chemistry going on. And what was it? You said that if you actually look at the history of the universe, what we're doing happens in the first like 10 seconds after the Big Bang.
Brian 21:06
Yes, there's this deeper metaphor of you start with just quarks, and then you end up building atoms, and that basically means that we're kind of the entire game is taking place between like the first 1,000th of a second and like the first couple of minutes after the Big Bang is that this is where this is where I want to I want to bring in Daniel to to talk to us about some of this stuff because we have questions.
Daniel 21:29
Yeah, well, the whole history of the universe is sort of the opposite of the deck building game in that it started out really fast and exciting and then got slow and boring. Oh,
Brian 21:38
good point.
Daniel 21:40
But you know, you start out with you know huge amounts of matter and antimatter, most of which annihilates with itself to produce photons. So the early universe is like mostly radiation, mostly photons, and very very little matter. But then that matter is like in the form of quarks and gluons and electrons. And then as the universe expands and cools that comes together because when things are hot and dense, they have too much energy to bind together. But as things expand and get colder, then they have low, less energy, so they can get captured, and so things then come together and build protons, for example, and neutrons. And then as the universe is cooling, it passes through very briefly a phase where it has the same density and the same temperature and the same pressure as the center of the sun. So it used to be much hotter and much denser, but it's cooling. It passes through a like center of the sun phase where the whole universe is like the center of the sun. And during that brief window, it does what the center of the sun does, which is fuse. It brings protons together to make helium. It it does that kind of stuff. Now, the heart of the star, you have billions of years until you work all the way up to like iron. But here, we only had a couple of minutes as the universe cooled through this phase, and then it got too cold to do it any longer. So, very very brief, you know, early universe fusion. We call it Big Bang nucleosynthesis, nucleosynthesis like building nuclei.
Brian 23:05
That's very cool. Okay, so when I was looking this up, we we call these there's these epochs here, which I'm used to thinking of epochs as these like large frames of time, but like you had what it was it called the first one where you had just free quarks and gluons was at the hadron epoch, and it lasted for less than a second.
Daniel 23:24
Yeah, a lot of these are very, very brief, and I don't remember all the names of them. Some of them aren't even standardized. But yeah, quarks and gluons are not things that we see normally in the universe. They are so powerfully bound together that you basically can't have a free quark. But in the early, if you have enough energy density, then you have enough energy that there's always quarks around. Then you have this thing called a quark gluon plasma, which is sort of like a plasma in the normal sense, where you take and you take like hydrogen and you ionize this. You have protons and electrons flying around instead of bound together. So you call that a plasma. This is a quark gluon plasma where the quarks inside protons and neutrons come apart, and you just have a big soup, which might be what's happening now in the heart of like neutron stars.
Brian 24:08
That was my other question. I guess is when else do we see free quarks in the universe?
Daniel 24:12
Never. Nobody's ever seen one.
Jason 24:16
Okay, so now the the part of so I'm kind of the one in charge of making sure we define all our terminology, we've got a lot we need to define for our audience now. So I'm going to start off. Let's start by doing some basic questions, and let's kind of work our way down. So let's start off with what's an atom, because we talk about that. Like I learned about, I made an atom model way back in sixth grade, and because I'm an overachiever, I chose Lawrenceium, which was like the biggest one on our periodic table at the time. So that's yeah, Jason Wallace, 12, 12 year old overachiever. But like, what is an atom? When we talk about it, what do we mean? Like, what are the characteristics defined? Like, hey, this thing. Is an atom, and this thing over here is not an atom.
Daniel 25:03
I think historically it comes from discovering that the universe, which is filled with almost infinite variety, can be built out of a few basic building blocks, and so that's the periodic table of the elements. You know, and it's kind of incredible that everything you've ever eaten or touched or thrown at your spouse is made out of like 100 building blocks. Actually, most of them a much much smaller set.
Brian 25:28
Kelly gave the hardest side eye at that.
Kelly 25:31
What are you throwing at your spouse?
Daniel 25:34
That was for you, Kelly. I figured at the end of your board games, there is some things being tossed around.
Kelly 25:39
I am not physically throwing things. No, I'm just other than my arms. Just throwing up my arms.
Daniel 25:44
Yeah, just throwing out looks. So you know, it's incredible, sort of philosophically, that you can go from like very, very huge number of different arrangements, you know, complexity from a small number of things. It tells you that like most of the complexity in the universe comes from the arrangement of stuff, not from the stuff itself, which I think is sort of like the Lego principle of the universe. So, what is an atom? It's this like intermediate step in taking matter apart. We identified that 150 years ago, and all of them consist of a nucleus, which is positively charged, and electrons around it, which are negatively charged.
Jason 26:20
But then, as you said, we can take these apart, which gets us down to like our nucleus of protons and neutrons, and the electron on the edge. So now we have the next question: What's a proton? Again, we talk about these.
Daniel 26:34
A proton is the thing that defines what an element is. So, like hydrogen is one proton, helium is two protons. You can add neutrons to these things. It doesn't change their elemental nature. So, like you add a neutron to hydrogen, you still have hydrogen. You have a different isotope of it, but it's still hydrogen. So the number of protons is the thing that defines what atom it is. Gold is defined by the number of protons in it. Lead is different because it has a different number of protons, so protons are the things that tell you what element they are. And microscopically, they're made of quarks, and they're made of a certain arrangement of quarks, up quarks and down quarks, and they're positively charged. And the other arrangement, which I never remember which is two up and which is two down, get this right wrong half the time.
Brian 27:21
That makes me happy because I was so worried I was going to screw that up. So I'm glad I'm not the only one. I think the protons up up down and the neutrons down down up.
Daniel 27:29
Could be. I look it up on Wikipedia probably nine times a day.
Brian 27:32
We should get. We can send you the player mat from subatomic.
Daniel 27:37
Yeah. So that's a proton. It's one configuration of up quarks and down quarks, and one thing that's special about a proton is that it's stable. Like you put a proton together and you leave it alone, you come back a trillion years later, we think it'll still be there. But a neutron, you put it out in space, it decays in like 11 minutes, and so a proton is an incredible building block because the protons in your body have existed for billions of years. They were probably made during the Big Bang, and they're still around. It's the same protons.
Jason 28:08
why are protons so much more stable than neutrons? And it sounds like free neutrons because it sounds like once you put them in a in a nucleus with other protons, they're okay. But why are the why are the two of them so differently stable?
Daniel 28:20
Well, stability comes from not being able to decay into anything else, and a neutron can decay into a proton. has a tiny little bit more mass, which means has a little bit more binding energy, and so can decay into a proton, and it does that by emitting a beta particle. But a proton can't go anywhere. It's like asking, you know, why is an electron stable? Because there's nothing lower mass that it can decay into, whereas a muon, which is like a heavier version of the electron, can decay into an electron. So all the stuff at like the bottom rung of the decay ladder is stable because it's got nowhere else to go. Because the universe, unlike this game, respects conservation laws.
Daniel 28:59
You can't to decay into something if you like if it has a different charge, which is why like you can't combine two neutral photons to make an electron. Like uh uh the universe says no.
Brian 29:07
I tried looking this up. I was like, is this right? This doesn't seem right. But I don't know. Well, I guess they said that two gammas could collide and give you an electron-positron pair, and then they just say, well, we're not going to worry about the positrons. They're just going to fly away.
Daniel 29:20
Okay, just universe's most fundamental rule that's never been broken. We're just gonna break that one. Yeah.
Brian 29:26
Well, we have to have matter from somewhere, right? I mean, the fact that there's any matter at all is already one of the biggest mysteries in physics.
Daniel 29:34
Sure. Yeah. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Brian 29:36
Okay. So I guess in subatomic, it's like, well, we have to have a game, but why is there a game instead of no game?
Daniel 29:45
Because we want to make money,
Brian 29:48
but we're going to teach people some cool, maybe slightly wrong stuff in the meantime,
Kelly 29:52
and have fun.
Jason 29:53
So I'm going to continue my train of digging down. So say, okay, so we have atoms, which are what is what matters made. Out of, and then we have protons and neutrons and electrons, which are what atoms are made of. And then inside the protons and neutrons, we've got quarks, and they're held together by gluons, which are I assume were named because they glue the quarks together. Is that right?
Daniel 30:15
Yes, absolutely. Okay.
Jason 30:17
What are those? What is a quark and what is a gluon?
Brian 30:21
And I want to know why we only talk about two of the six, and why we can't have other arrangements of up and down.
Daniel 30:27
Yeah, well, quarks are something we've found in the universe. As far as we know, they're not made of anything else. They are fundamental, but that might just be because we haven't been able to see what's inside them yet. Everything we've ever seen is made of something smaller, and we just haven't seen yet what's inside the quarks. So it might take like a collider the size of the solar system to see what's inside the quarks. We don't know, or it could be that this is the base level of reality we found. It seems unlikely because there's a bunch of patterns in the quarks that we can't explain to suggest, like the periodic table, that it's an emergent phenomena from something smaller, more microscopic. So, what are the quarks? They're just stuff we found, and two of them, up quarks and down quarks, make up the proton and the neutron and other stuff. But we've also found other quarks: the strange, the charm, the top, the bottom. These are much more massive, which is why they don't stick around because they decay down to the lower mass ones. The up quark and down quark can't decay into anything else because they're the lowest mass ones, and because again you can't violate conservation of charge, you can't like that down can't decay into the up, and so there are these other heavier quarks. We don't know why they exist. We don't know why there aren't more. Like you know why aren't there 47 quarks or 492? Why six? What about the universe is six-ish? And then what are the gluons? The gluons are force-carrying particles. So the way the photon is the particle of electromagnetism, there's another force in the universe called the nuclear strong force, and the gluon is the force-carrying particle of the nuclear strong force. So it plays the role of the photon, but for a different force.
Jason 32:05
Okay, so these quarks are basically emitting gluons at each other all the time, and that binds them together.
Daniel 32:11
Yeah, well, one way to think about it is like if you think about the Earth is bound to the Sun by the Sun's gravitational field, or if you're a chemistry person, you think of the electron is bound to the atom by the atom's electric field, then the quarks are bound together by each other's strong fields or color fields, as we call them. And one way to think about it is in terms of fields. Another totally equivalent way to think about them is that they're exchanging particles. So if you like to think about particles, you can think quarks are constantly exchanging particles back and forth, which is how they transfer momentum to each other. The same way you can think about, like, how do two electrons push against each other? One way to think about it is they have electric fields that push on each other. Another way is that they exchange virtual photons constantly. So you can either think about the fields or you can think about the particles. So either you like to think about gluon fields or gluon particles. It's two different stories, two different versions of the same story.
Jason 33:03
Okay, I definitely say that the field one is much more intuitive to me. Like I, I can picture like gravitational fields and magnetic fields. They're things I have experience with. Whereas like the con, like if if things are exchanging particles, I feel like they should push each other away rather than pull each other towards each other, rather than pull towards each other.
Daniel 33:19
Well, you can exchange particles with negative momentum. That's how it works in that picture. But yeah, that that's counterintuitive. But somebody else would say, like, man, you're talking about a field that fills the universe. Like that's counterintuitive. So it's just a question of like, what kind of story is natural to you? And there's a raging debate among philosophers about which one is more fundamental.
Brian 33:39
So why can't I have that up, up, up combo.
Daniel 33:43
You can have an up up up combo system. It's not. In fact, every combination exists. We could look it up. But this is how they discovered it. Actually, they found the proton and the neutron, and they found other particles. And they're like, oh my gosh, there's like a zoo of them. They must be some way to build these out of a smaller set, and then they predicted the existence of one they hadn't seen yet, which would be a new combination that they, because the time they knew about the up, the down, and the strange. Okay, they predicted the SSS, the triple strange particle, and then they went out and saw it. So that was really cool.
Brian 34:18
That is cool.
Daniel 34:19
If these really are made of these basic little building blocks. We should be able to arrange them in this other way. Okay. And so, yeah, there's no rule against an up, up, up particle. In fact, what is that called?
Kelly 34:29
Sometimes I think you're just making this stuff up.
Brian 34:32
Well, it sounds cool. Yeah, yeah.
Jason 34:34
You got to admit, whoever named the quarks, I mean, there's there's no properties that would give the names. It was like up and down. That's the first two, and then top and bottom. I guess was after that.
Daniel 34:46
Charm and strange, and then top and bottom. Yeah. Well, up and down because they they are related, and the up quark has a positive charge, and the down quark has a negative charge. So there's something there, and some of the particles they mixed with were a little weird. They had like really short lifetimes, so they called those strange particles. And then later, when they figured out what they were made of, they were like, "Oh, that's because they have a strange quirk in them". And then when they found out the strange had a partner, also they were like, "Oh, we need another name that sounds kind of like strange. And they were like, "How about charm?" Because that's more positive. Because it's the positive version of it. And then, yeah, and then there was actually a debate about what to call the last set. Some people wanted to call them truth and beauty. Other people called them top and bottom. I think truth and beauty was more European, and top and bottom was more American. Anyway, top and bottom won out. I think mostly because the Americans discovered the top quark. But yeah, there's a lot of arguments about this kind of stuff.
Brian 35:40
This makes me want to turn quarks into like a tabletop RPG stat system.
Daniel 35:45
Yeah, and by the way, the up up up particle is called the doubly charged delta.
Brian 35:51
That's very catchy. I assume it's also unstable.
Daniel 35:56
It is unstable. Yes.
Brian 35:57
Okay. So this is the the famed particle zoo. This is this is the okay neat. I'm learning so much. Thank you. Oh, I have a thing that I think Daniel, you're probably going to have an opinion on for sure. So in the game, you can build four different types of atomic nuclei. They ignore hydrogen because every time you get a proton, you have a hydrogen nuclei. They do helium, lithium, but also beryllium and boron. Are those too heavy to have been produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis,
Jason 36:26
which for our listeners those are elements two through five of the periodic table. So they're basically the we have the first five elements on the periodic table: sans hydrogen, which is number one.
Daniel 36:39
But on big bang nucleosynthesis, like this, was very brief, and so you had time to make helium. You had time to make a little bit of lithium and beryllium. Technically, yes, you do make some very trace amounts of like boron and heavier stuff. We're talking about like fractions, like 10 to the minus 17 or 10 to the minus 32 as you get into the heavier element. So, like the universe is a big place and there's lots of particles so really unlikely stuff does happen it just happens less often than the more likely stuff so it's like overwhelmingly the universe is still hydrogen is like some helium made and trace amounts of lithium and then as you go up higher up the periodic table we're talking in like really vanishing numbers, so you know if you put me on the stand to testify in a billion dollar trial, if somebody sued this this board maker, I would say technically there are some trace amounts of boron produced in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, but it's really negligible, which is why you don't hear about it very much.
Brian 37:36
Interesting. Okay, I wonder how we could modify the game to reflect. I mean, again, you make simplifications and abstractions for the game because you got to give people an interesting set of choices to do. The boron is worth more points because it's a heavier element, but it also seems like there should be fewer boron cards in the deck. Like the proportions should also be reflective of that. Because I don't, I don't know if that's true. I'm gonna guess that most of the elements that you can build are there in roughly equal numbers. Yeah. Okay. So let me see. There was another thing in the game, and this caught my attention right from the beginning: is that you are quote unquote completing your atoms when you've added two electrons to them, but then they are pretty specific of saying you are not making, with the exception of neutral of helium, everything is is charged, right? And they're explicit about that. It even says it on the card that you're creating boron plus three or something like that. How cool would the universe have to be before you could start holding on electrons, even in that lowest orbit, where you're getting things that were holding electrons during this phase of Big Bang nucleosynthesis?
Daniel 38:39
Yeah, that didn't happen till like 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
Brian 38:43
Okay, that's what I thought,
Daniel 38:44
and we actually know that because that's the moment the universe went from being opaque to transparent. Like the center of the sun, pretty opaque, filled with plasma. You make a photon, it's going to get gobbled up by some of the zillions of charged particles, but when the universe cooled enough for electrons to grab onto protons to get bound together into neutral hydrogen, then it became transparent, like hydrogen gas is transparent, and so the photons made after that moment are still around, and we've seen them. That's the famous cosmic microwave background radiation, and so that's actually how we proved that the universe was really hot and dense a long time ago, and so that's the moment when it's called recombination, when protons and electrons found each other and made neutral hydrogen. So it took a long time.
Brian 39:28
So so we're doing the first 1,000th of a second to the first couple of minutes plus a couple 100,000 years.
Daniel 39:34
Yeah, exactly. See, things happen really fast early on, and then it started to take a while.
Brian 39:40
Okay, that is so funny because you're right. The game is backwards; it speeds up as you go. When actually, again, not fun as a game though. So maybe we're in an anti-universe or something.
Daniel 39:50
Yeah, I don't think the structure of the universe would make a fun game.
Jason 39:55
Why are neutral atoms transparent to photons? Like why do do most photons just pass right through them? Whereas if you've got charged electrons and charged positrons or charged nuclei floating around, why do they absorb the photons instead of letting them pass by?
Daniel 40:13
Yeah, great question, and it's basically quantum mechanics. So if you have an electron around hydrogen atom, it can absorb photons, and it will, but it's limited. It can only absorb photons that will let it go up or down an energy level around the hydrogen atom. So, if you take hydrogen, for example, and you heat it up, you get atomic spectra. You get emissions of very specific energies because that's the ladder of energy the electrons allowed to. Because in a bound state, things are quantized and you get discrete energy levels. But an electron flying free through the universe, it can absorb any photon at any energy, or it can emit photons at whatever energy. So, if you have a non, if you have an ionized gas and you shoot a photon through it, there's always going to be some particle that can eat it. If you have a neutral gas and you shoot a photon through it at most energies. That photon will see it as transparent. If, however, you shoot a photon at exactly the right energy that matches the energy levels of the hydrogen, it will eat that. Which is why, for example, if you look at light from the sun, you see that there are there are bands in that spectrum that are missing because the sun emits a bunch of light, and the sun's atmosphere eats some of those bands at certain wavelengths. Because the gasses in the atmosphere can eat those specific bands, so you can actually tell what elements are in the sun's atmosphere just by looking at the light, the pattern of the light, and saying like, "Oh, there must be this atom because it eats this fingerprint, and that atom eats that fingerprint, and you can do that also for super distant stars. We can tell what elements are in each star just by looking at the pattern of the light from that star.
Brian 41:49
And we have those spectral lines in the in the cosmic background radiation as well. For is that how we tell what the what the early universe was composed of?
Daniel 41:59
Ooh, not quite, because the cosmic microwave background radiation comes from just that moment when hydrogen is formed, so it's emitted just before then, and so the universe is transparent. But it was crazy, crazy hot, so it was emitted at like 3000 Kelvin, and then it's been redshifted down to very, very low energies.
Jason 42:20
And 3000 Kelvin is roughly what, like 2700 Celsius, which is roughly what, like five to 10,000 Fahrenheit. Big numbers.
Daniel 42:29
I think the difference between Kelvin and Celsius is just 270, right? So, yeah. So that's right. Yeah. Sorry. Subtraction is addition to pile. Yeah. Yeah, very hot, super hot, exactly.
Brian 42:46
So, hey, this seems like the perfect opportunity to slip into our nitpick corner, and I want to talk about where you actually get electrons from, if it's not from smashing together gamma ray photons.
Daniel 42:59
So, photons can. So, number one. Photons don't have to be gamma rays, right? Photons represent the entire electromagnetic spectrum. So like radio waves are photons, X rays are photons, UV light is photons. Gamma rays are just one particular slice of the spectrum where you have a certain high energy, and we see lots of gamma rays in the universe. They're very cool, and photons can turn into electrons if they also turn into a positron. So you have to conserve charge. Photons have no charge; you can turn into an electron-positron pair, and that's happening all the time. As a photon flies through the universe, it's actually all the time turning into a pair of electrons and positrons, and then back into a photon. So that kind of stuff happens all the time.
Brian 43:42
Where did the electrons come from? Is that where they came from?
Daniel 43:45
Yeah. Well, electrons and positrons, we think, were made at the same level in the very, very early universe.
Brian 43:51
Okay.
Daniel 43:53
But there's some asymmetry there that we don't understand. Like for some reason, more electrons were made than anti-electrons, and which is why when they all annihilated together, some electrons were left over. So it's like most of the matter in the universe annihilated very, very quickly, and what's left over is what made stars and planets and lava and kittens and ice cream and all that stuff. And that was like one part in a billion, I think. I don't remember the exact number, but like most of the matter and the antimatter that existed in the early universe is gone, and we are the tiny, tiny little leftover scraps. So we don't know. The answer fundamentally is we don't know the source of the asymmetry. Why is the universe matter and not antimatter? Why is there this apparent symmetry between the particles, and yet there's an asymmetry in the early universe? Maybe it was made symmetric, and then there's some process that prefers matter, or maybe it was made asymmetric, which would be really weird. But we don't understand that. It's one of the biggest questions in particle physics.
Brian 44:46
I think in the Marvel universe, it's because Galactus was there.
Kelly 44:51
That's all you need to know.
Brian 44:55
So you can you can smash together two photons, or photons can turn into. To an electron-positron pair, and at that point, if you want to just get an electron, what the positron needs to get sucked up by a black hole or something.
Daniel 45:07
Yes, and also it's tricky to smash together two photons because photons only interact with things that have electric charge. Photons don't have electric charge.
Brian 45:16
Okay.
Daniel 45:16
So normally, when two photons hit each other, they pass right through. They don't interact. It's possible for them to interact if, at the same time as they're overlapping, they happen to both convert, or one of them converts into electron-positron pair, which can interact with the other photon, but it's not direct. So, like you know, two lightsabers technically should pass right through each other. Oh no!
Brian 45:37
Maybe we maybe we just should have had electron cards you can buy. I guess the problem is, what do you pay for them? Energy, I suppose.
Jason 45:44
I mean, we do have electron cards you can buy, and you but you have to pay for them are photons.
Brian 45:48
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Is how do we how do we shift the game to be a little closer to reality?
Daniel 45:53
How to keep the total charge of the universe constant, man? That's the one principle of accounting the universe respects.
Brian 45:59
Okay, let's see. Any other nitpicks that we should talk about about the game, Jason? Or hey, Kelly, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta nitpick.
Kelly 46:06
Nope, nope. Thanks for asking.
Jason 46:11
I don't have enough particle physics to nitpick. I think
Kelly 46:13
same.
Brian 46:14
Obviously, one of the things that was a nitpick that I already mentioned is that for some reason, when you annihilate particles, you have to pay energy to do it. When you annihilate cards, like you should be getting energy back from that, not not having to spend energy. I think I don't know, Daniel. What do you think? I
Daniel 46:27
could counter nitpick by saying, okay, you gotta sometimes push the particles together. Like you know, annihilation doesn't just happen. Okay, like we had a collider where we smashed electrons and positrons together to annihilate them to see what happened, like you do, but as one does. But we, you know, we had to spend a lot of energy to get them up to high speeds to push them together. So sometimes you do spend energy to annihilate particles, but then you also get energy out. And one common misconception is that when you annihilate particles, they release like pure energy. And I hear that phrase a lot. I probably even said it on the pod. What really happens is that they turn into some other form. So, like electron, positron annihilate, you get a photon or a Z boson or something else. So it always turns into another. It's just transmitting it from one kind of field or one kind of particle to another.
Brian 47:17
Why don't we do our grades? We're going to do a fun grade and a science grade. You guys can recuse yourself, or you can. Hey, if you want, if you want to weigh in, that is totally cool. I think we'll start with Jason. Let me get your fun grade and your science grade.
Jason 47:31
I would say that for science, I'd probably give this about a B plus, maybe up into the A minus range. I think it highlights a a part of chemistry and nuclear physics and such that most people don't get exposed to, and it gets them exposed to the terminology of it. At least in terms of like quarks and like, hey, build these things up and such. It's not super deep. Like you get exposed to a few things and then you use them to build up your deck. So there's not a ton there, but there are some. There are a few breaks from reality in terms of the game mechanics, like smashing the photons together and such. So overall, I'd put it B plus, maybe A minus, depending on how generous I'm feeling at the time. And then for fun, I'd probably do about the same. It was actually more fun than I was expecting. Probably about A minus range. Okay, maybe B. I'm going to flip it instead of B plus A minus. It's A minus B plus. It's like I'd like to play this a few more times to see exactly where it gels. It doesn't seem like one I'm going to race to take off the shelf, but it also like I wouldn't mind playing this again.
Brian 48:35
That's it's always something you want to hear from your grader. It's like, well, I'm feeling generous today. Better than the alternative. Yeah, I think okay. The again, I use a scale where I'm worried someone will come away from a game like this where they'll come away with the bad information. And based on what Daniel has had to say about how photons, about how electrons are generated, I think I'm gonna I'm gonna ding it for that because I do think every everything else seems to be holding up pretty well. It's like, oh well, electrons come from bashing gamma rays together, so I I can't really give it above a B just for that, which does make me sad because I think everything else is there. Also, I wish that they'd been more explicit about this deeper analogy of the early universe because that would have been really cool, a really cool framing. That's definitely in the game, and they just don't make part of it's part of the subtext instead of the text. So a fun, yeah. I'll give it an A minus. I'll play it again. I think we should play with a higher player count. I think it's a fun game.
Jason 49:35
So what are the odds you think we can drag our spouses into playing yet another science game at game night?
Brian 49:41
Very low.
Jason 49:44
Both of our spouses have gotten a little tired of all the science games we bring around to playtest for the podcast.
Brian 49:49
We do play other games. We do play other games too. But anyway, okay, Daniel Kelly, what do you guys want to want to give a fun or a science grade, or are you recusing yourself from the grading process?
Daniel 50:01
I don't think I should give a grade until I play the game. Yeah. Yes.
Kelly 50:05
Same. I feel like I need to collect data before I'm willing to critique something, and yeah, I don't have the data.
Brian 50:10
That's that is totally fine. And actually, we had our subject matter experts when they grade. They are always much harsher graders than we are because they're experts, right? So the little things really stick in like a bad way, so I think we're probably gonna wrap it up there. Thank you, Kelly and Daniel, for coming on. This was awesome. I was so excited to find, you know, a a particle physicist, science communicator, and Kelly.
Kelly 50:36
And Kelly,
Brian 50:38
actually, Kelly, when we find when we find a parasitology game. You know I'm going to call you about that, right?
Kelly 50:44
Amazing! I can't wait.
Brian 50:46
Okay,
Jason 50:46
and I'm still waiting for a deeper conversation with you because I want to try to. I'm. I haven't yet found the Venn diagram overlap between space and parasites outside of the Alien series. So
Kelly 50:57
I. I haven't either. I haven't either. But you know, I like. I'm all over the place, and and and like evidence that I'm all over the place is that I just remembered while we were talking that my favorite game should have been the trivia game that I worked on with Erasmus Fox, but I missed the chance to pitch. Everyone thinks this game is awesome, but there it is. I did a great trivia game with Zach, where we like spent six months coming up with great trivia questions.
Brian 51:17
You have a trivia game that you already know is out there on the market. Well, we're gonna put that in the show notes. My goodness, of course. Let's see. And then Daniel, I know that you also, when you say in the podcast, you say you are not only a lumpy space enjoyer, but also like thinking about aliens. Correct.
Daniel 51:35
I do. I like thinking about whether our science is universal, like something we've discovered, or partially human, something we've invented to help us think about the universe, and I explored that in my latest book. Do aliens speak physics? Which wonders when aliens arrive, can we talk to them about particle physics, or will they have a completely different way to understand the universe?
Jason 51:57
And so, if our listeners want to look y'all up, where should they find you?
Kelly 52:01
Well, you can find our podcast, Daniel Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. I also have written some books, and if you just look up Kelly Weinersmith online, they should they should pop up. And yeah, that's how to find me.
Daniel 52:13
Yeah, just Google us. We're everywhere. Yeah,
Brian 52:16
I know Daniel's on Instagram. I don't think you've ever made a post, so
Daniel 52:19
that's probably true. I don't get Instagram.
Brian 52:24
With that, we're going to cut it there, listeners. Thank you for tuning in for this wonderful conversation. Hope you have a great month and great games.
Jason 52:31
Have fun playing Dice with the Universe. See ya.
Brian 52:35
This has been the Gaming with Science podcast. Copyright 2026. Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non-commercial purpose as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun playing Dice with the Universe.
Daniel 53:00
And then, are we not going to make any comments on the name Boron?
Brian 53:03
Why? Sure. What? What do we? What do we want to know about boron?
Daniel 53:07
I mean, you're making it sound so exciting, but the name of it is boron. I mean, it just-it sounds like such a, you know, such a dud of an element.
Brian 53:15
I like boron.
Daniel 53:18
It's like a boring bozo or something. I don't know. It's a funny combination.
Kelly 53:22
I feel like it's ironic that that the physicist is critiquing a name from another field because I mean, you know, the charm and the strange like that was cute, but like y'all, you know, usually make very confusing kind of boring names. I'm sorry to say it. No, you're not
Brian 53:38
I don't know the etymology of boron. So I don't know why it's called that. But yeah, the ones with the simpler names probably got discovered earlier, and I don't know why it's called boron. Jason, do you have this off the top of your head? You know, you know factoids. No, okay, all right. Well,
Kelly 53:54
I've got it. Oh, comes from the. So I'm reading this from Google. Comes from the mineral borax combined with the chemical suffix on, modeled after carbon.
Brian 54:03
So then the deeper question is, why do we call borax borax then, huh?
Kelly 54:06
Oh,
Brian 54:07
that I don't actually know either.
Kelly 54:09
Layers like an onion. We're back to onions.
Brian 54:11
Or an atom.
Daniel 54:12
And are there people out there who are anti-boraxers? Probably.
Brian 54:18
That's a Jason level joke. That's great.
Daniel 54:22
Wow, that's quite a complement.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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