Shadowing Practice: We’re Getting Closer to Discovering Why There’s A Universe At All - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
131 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Why is there matter in the universe at all?
2
That's one of the longest standing questions in modern astrophysics.
3
And the largest particle accelerator in the world may have cracked the egg of that question.
4
Let's go back in time to when the universe was the seething soup of matter and energy.
5
The energy manifests as photons, the matter manifesting as particles.
6
In fact, they were matter-anti-matter particle pairs.
7
Anytime the photon has sufficient energy, it will spontaneously convert itself into pairs of particles,
8
according to E equals MC squared.
9
E for energy, M for matter.
10
This is the famous Einstein equation from 1905.
11
Not the reason why he was given the Nobel Prize 16 years later, by the way.
12
So, the way it works is, you start out with energy, if you're gonna make matter, the matter has to be such that if you recombine it,
13
you get the energy again.
14
So when a photon becomes matter, it becomes a matter-antimatter particle pair.
15
Then that particle pair finds each other and becomes the photon again.
16
And this is that soup that was sustained in the early universe.
17
back and forth.
18
Anytime there was matter, there was an equal amount of antimatter ready to re-annihilate and become photons again.
19
The universe was happy in that state while it was expanding and cooling.
20
Until, for some mysterious reason,
21
one in a billion conversions of a photon into matter-antimatter particle pairs made only a matter particle.
22
and no antimatter for every 999,999,999 photons.
23
And the dance card of one of those particles, a matter particle, went unmatched.
24
So as the universe expanded and cooled, the matter-antimatter particles that could find mates,
25
did, became photons, leaving, stranding, one matter particle.
26
And that is the universe we live in today.
27
There was some symmetry broken in the early universe
28
Symmetry laws are very powerful tools in physics that give us insights into phenomenon experiments time place pressure
29
that You wouldn't otherwise know were it not for these symmetry rules and if at any time symmetry breaks Oh my gosh,
30
we better find out why This has been a longstanding problem in modern astrophysics.
31
As the universe cools, the energy of the photon systematically drops.
32
When it drops below the energy of any two particles that it could possibly make, these are particles with a mass,
33
convert that through E equals mc squared to find out how much energy it takes to make these two particles.
34
If the energy of all the photons drops below that, below that, then the conversion of energy into matter stops.
35
It can still happen in the centers of stars, but overall in the universe, it stops.
36
We have not understood this symmetry breaking, we have not been able to duplicate it in our laboratories,
37
in our particle accelerators, which are nothing more than the physicist petri dish of the early universe.
38
We set up the conditions in our particle accelerators
39
that resemble what was going on in the early universe
40
and that's how we know anything that was happening near the Big Bang itself.
41
Alright, so the Greeks imagined that if you broke down matter to smaller
42
and smaller bits you'd get to something that was indivisible and the Greek word for indivisible is atom.
43
In late 19th century science we would learn that atoms are in fact divisible.
44
They're composed of particles themselves.
45
Electrons that gives us our electrical current.
46
The nucleus of atoms are protons and neutrons.
47
Then people figured, well, now we have the fundamental particles.
48
Electrons, protons, and neutrons.
49
But then we found out you can bust open protons and neutrons into smaller particles still.
50
And that's when physicist, theorist Murray Gell-Mann,
51
realized that maybe there are three particles contained within each the neutron and the proton.
52
And remembering a quote from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, three quarks for Mustermark.
53
He said, oh, there's three, and that sentence has the word quark in it, let's call them quarks.
54
We would later learn that there are more kinds of quarks than those three, but the name has stuck, and we're fine with it.
55
Won't be the last time physicists use fanciful terms to describe newly discovered particles.
56
These quarks have fractional charges.
57
Think about it.
58
If a proton is composed of three quarks and a proton has plus one, then the charges on these three quarks have to add up to plus one.
59
So the proton has two quarks that have plus two thirds charge.
60
Add two thirds plus two thirds, what do you get?
61
You get one and a third.
62
And it has a quark that has a minus one third charge.
63
So two thirds plus two thirds minus one third, that gives you plus one.
64
And if you take these and combine them in all kinds of ways, or you get the anti-matter versions of those quarks that have the opposite charge,
65
you can add them up to get a minus one charge, or you can add them up to get no charge at all.
66
So if you want to make an anti-matter neutron, you say, well, what's the opposite charge of no charge?
67
Got to go inside, find out which quarks it's made of, then get the anti-quarks of that, put them together to still get you no charge.
68
So you get a matter no charge neutron and an anti-matter no charge neutron.
69
fun with particle physics.
70
And we would learn, in my lifetime by the way, because that's how old I am, that there are three energy levels of particles.
71
Three families.
72
The low-energy one, which we live in, the electrons, protons, neutrons, this sort of thing.
73
The next level has heavier versions of those particles and those quarks.
74
Heavier versions.
75
And there's There's a third level as well, at even higher energies that we discovered in our most powerful particle accelerators.
76
So you combine all three of these regimes together into one description, and that is the standard model of particle physics.
77
Recently at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, acronym CERN, C-E-R-N, in their Large Hadron Collider,
78
Hadrons are nuclear particles, so it's really busting up atomic nuclei.
79
They found an asymmetry in the formation of matter and antimatter particle pairs.
80
But it was for a special configuration of particles.
81
So how did they do it?
82
It turns out the neutron is unstable.
83
Within about 15 minutes, a neutron will decay into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino.
84
Well, why those three particles?
85
Well a neutron is what we call a baryon.
86
We need another baryon on the other side of that equation It's the proton check, but neutron has no charge
87
Proton has a plus charge got to get rid of
88
that somehow You know what's created an electron with a negative charge cancels out the charges.
89
We're good there The electron is what's called a lepton.
90
I didn't start with leptons by the time I'm done I better not have any either in the particle arithmetic
91
So you know what it comes out?
92
An anti-neutrino.
93
Neutrinos are leptons just like electrons.
94
So an anti-neutrino cancels the electron and so now There's nothing that we started with that we didn't also end with.
95
That's how the particle physics works.
96
It works magnificently, but what CERN did was they made a special kind of neutron.
97
They took out one of the quarks of of the neutron and swapped in a quark from the higher energy level regime.
98
This would not normally happen.
99
You don't normally see this.
100
So they made a heavy neutron and then they waited and watched.
101
And out of 80,000 decays of that neutron, 2.5% of them did not make an antimatter particle,
102
violating the symmetry laws of physics.
103
Now, who thought this up?
104
Who said, hey, let's take a quark from here where it doesn't belong and put it over here and see what happens? happens,
105
that's part of the creativity of the scientists to figure out how to test what nature is up to, what nature is capable of,
106
what might have been happening in the early universe.
107
It's not clear whether this kind of particle prevailed in the early universe,
108
but it wouldn't take much of an asymmetry to set things into motion
109
and end up with a universe made of just matter and no antimatter.
110
What do I mean by no antimatter?
111
We create antimatter in the lab, the sun makes antimatter in its core, but it's always paired with a matter particle.
112
We're talking about loner matter particles.
113
Okay, it's a crack in the egg of this matter-antimatter asymmetry.
114
And maybe there's more to be revealed, but right now it's a measurement for which there is no understanding.
115
There is no theory of physics that accounts for it.
116
because in fact it's a violation of very strongly held physical principles.
117
So watch that space.
118
It's the famous matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe.
119
So let's have fun with that briefly.
120
Maybe the antimatter particles were created in the early universe, but they slipped out of this universe and made another universe.
121
Maybe there's another universe that's made of all antimatter.
122
So if there were planets and stars and life, they'd be made of antimatter.
123
Maybe they're aliens in that other universe and if they can tunnel, take a wormhole, and come into our universe...
124
The first thing I do if you greet an alien is flip it a coin.
125
If the alien spontaneously explodes upon catching the coin, it was made of antimatter.
126
And it came from another universe.
127
So I always carry a coin just in case There's an alien that I have to greet right now.
128
That's the frontier of science fiction
129
Maybe one day becoming science fact and that's what's up with that
130
I'm watching that space and I invite you to do so as well as always Keep looking up
131
Thank you.
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
Same Channel
B25
The Missions Bringing Us Back to the Moon
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
C12
How to Tell What’s Real Online
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
C15
Two Astrophysicists Debate Free Will
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C12
My thoughts on the first round of UFO files
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C13
Why Do We Exist? With Hakeem Oluseyi
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C1The Biggest El Niño in Recorded History
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C1Steven Spielberg Believes in Aliens
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1Neil’s Most Important Explainer Ever
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
FOR YOU
Recommend Video
C12
47 sentences
We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
13 sentences
Where Did the Antimatter Go?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C12
52 sentences
Supernatural thinking: Your brain’s anti-anxiety mode | Clay Routledge
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
39 sentences
Why Walls STOP Light Waves But Not Radio Waves?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
62 sentences
A mind-blowing explanation of symmetry | Frank Wilczek for Big Think
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
28 sentences
What Is The Universe?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C18
156 sentences
How Quantum Batteries Break Every Rule of Charging
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C13
627 sentences
Brian Cox - The Most Mysterious Facts About The Universe
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C11
23 sentences
Black Hole Documentary 2019 - Part 1
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C16
224 sentences
Why Does Time Stop at the SPEED OF LIGHT? Feynman's Mind-Blowing Truth
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C13
234 sentences
The Philosophy of Rick Sanchez
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
427 sentences
The Absurd Engineering Behind the Internet
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
About This Lesson
In this lesson, you’ll practice listening to and repeating complex scientific explanations from a YouTube video about the universe’s origins. You’ll work on understanding technical vocabulary, following detailed narratives, and mimicking the speaker’s clear, conversational tone—key skills for improving English fluency. Use shadowing techniques to match the pace and emphasis, making this a great way to learn English with YouTube content.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Particle accelerator: A machine that speeds up subatomic particles to study their behavior.
- Antimatter: Matter composed of particles with properties opposite to normal matter (e.g., positrons vs. electrons).
- Symmetry breaking: A process in physics where a system loses its balance, leading to new properties (like the universe’s matter-antimatter imbalance).
- Annihilate: To destroy completely, as when matter and antimatter collide and turn into energy.
- Seething soup: A vivid phrase describing the chaotic, high-energy mixture of particles in the early universe.
Practice Tips
The video’s pace is moderate but includes long sentences—perfect for shadowing. Start by watching a 30-second clip, then pause and repeat it immediately, focusing on matching the speaker’s stress (e.g., emphasizing “one in a billion” or “symmetry broken”). Use a shadowing app to record yourself and compare it to the original; this helps improve English pronunciation and timing. For tricky phrases like “matter-antimatter particle pairs,” break them into chunks: “matter-antimatter” + “particle pairs.” Practice daily to build confidence in shadow speech—you’ll soon notice smoother delivery and better comprehension of technical content.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was given · was sustained · is composed |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · have not understood · has stuck |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.