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Creating New Matter: Primordial Soup @ CERN
hobgadling writes "According to ABC News, physicists at CERN in Geneva have recreated a "quark-gluon plasma", also known as the primordial soup, the state of the universe right after the big bang. The article here says that more experiments will have to be done at Brookhaven National Labs to prove this. " Brookhaven will be starting research in this area this summer - with much more powerful instrumentation.
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Please go and check the official web pages: A New State of Matter
The article is unclear on this. Is primordial soup actually another state of matter like Gas, solid, liquid, and plasma? or is it just a form of plasma or something?
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supports kiddie pr0n,d00d.
they sux0r!!!
It is certainly not just another plasma. The consituents (quarks and gluons) of the consitutents (protons and neutrons) of the neucleii of atoms are beleived to be out of their usual state (bound in triplets). I'd say that's a much more fundamental different than the different between gas and liquid.
This morning I was walking up to the machine to buy tickets for the subway when this gorgeous chick walked up at the same time. She was HOT, a perfect ten and in a nice mini skirt, too.
/. all day long, but no one even noticed. What a bunch of dumb turds. Now, c'mere you and give me a kiss.
Of course, I let her go first because I was hoping she might have sex with me. She didn't and then I bought my ticket.
Okay, here's the kicker: Just as I was stepping on the ramp, the train pulled away. The hot chick was on it, and I wasn't. Had I not let her in front of me I would have made it to work on time.
THIS IS A METAPHORE FOR LINUX IF I'VE EVER SEEN ONE.
I realized that Microsoft was the hot chick riding the subway, and I was the Linux user standing there with a boner YET AGAIN missing the boat. Only it was a train not a boat, but I've never heard anyone say "he really missed the train on that one!" Plus, I'm not a raging faggot like most Linux users, and they would have expected to ride the subway for free because they think everything is a hand-out.
Anyway, I was hoping I'd get fired for being late so I could go home and
How dense is this stuff? How many tons per square centimeter? If they produce sufficient quantities of this matter, you can create mini blackholes. I imagine they would imediately fall down, to the center of Earths gravity and suck our molten core dry. Scary thought.
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Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Please correct me, and I know you will if I am wrong, but isn't Primordial soup a generic term for the beginnings of life, is the simple amenio-acids that were formed in the past.
This experiment is about Primordial matter, discovering the origins of matter rather than 'life'
Working for the (other) man
Primordial Soup is the accepted term for the unknown collection of ingredients supposedly slopping about at the correct temperature etc for life to spontaniously form. This experiment is nothing to do with that state, it is more cosmological and seems to create the conditions shortly following an event, not the conditions required for it to spontaniously trigger.
I thought I'd heard that the latest thinking of great minds (such as Stephen Hawking's) was that the big bang theory was flawed, and that it probably didn't happen. True, or has somebody been pulling my leg?
We could have probably done this a few years ago if the SSC in Texas(?) hadn't been axed by Congress....but NOOOOOOOOOOOO.
God forbid we'd put any real money into scientific research when there's so many third world countries needing handouts so their citizens can buy more American cigarettes....so many people who've gone down on the President that need investigating....so many Windows licenses to buy!!!!
Put the budget surplus back into research. Maybe then we wouldn't lose any more Mars probes, blow up any more Delta rockets, and in a few years we'll all be driving Hover-cars with Mr. Fusions(tm) in the back.
Dammit!
Of course if this is what they think it is, this is damn cool. Maybe we can actually figure out a way to reliably produce and detect neutrinos next?
Anyone have any links re: the big neutrino detector tanks set up last year?
Blech. Signatures.
to be fair to CERN this is not a term mentioned anywhere but in the /. article. Seems like they are doing some seriously high energy physics though, they talk about a fireball expanding at c/2, now that counts as quick in my book.
As a direct result of your post, a dum turd was killed.
I thought I'd heard that the latest thinking of great minds (such as Stephen Hawking's) was that the big bang theory was flawed, and that it probably didn't happen. True, or has somebody been pulling my leg?
What Hawking said was that since in the equations of relativity (dt/ds)^2 has a negative sign whereas the three spacial differencials - (dx/ds)^2 etc. - have a positive sign time appears in space-time interval equations as -ict, where i is the square root of -1, an imaginary number. His postulate was that we should accept this at face value rather than writing it off as just an artifact of the equations.
This lead him to the idea of the universe being a 4-D hypersphere which is unbounded but finite, so that if you went far enough foward in time you would return to where you started. So there would be a cyclical evolution of the universe - a Big Bang type event followed by expansion, then contraction followed by a Big Crunch event, and so on and on. The idea isn't really that popular though.
Is primordial soup actually another state of matter like Gas, solid, liquid, and plasma? or is it just a form of plasma or something?
Whereas the four states you mention are all different states of regular matter - the quark-gluon plasma is where the actual nucleons that form the nuclei of atoms have broken down. Normally each nucleon consists of three quarks (udd for a neutron and uud for a proton IIRC) bound together by combinations of the eight types of gluon, which are the force carriers of the strong nuclear force.
Normally the gluons bind the quarks together so that you can only see them in combinations of either three quarks (the baryons) or a quark and an anti-quark (the mesons). As you add more energy to this system the force between the quarks actually increases (unlike gravity or electromagnetism) until you reach a point where you have pumped enough energy into the system to create an entirely new set of quarks, also bound. This property is called quark entanglement and is why so far we have never seen a free quark.
However at high enough energies quark entanglement breaks down and the quarks and gluons become free from each other, much in the same way that at high energies electrons and nuclei become free and form a plasma. This is why it is called a quark-gluon plasma.
But, on the off-chance it -is- soup, I'll have a cup, with some cheese and a slice of bread, please.
Quark soup is interesting, as it allows the formation of some -really- exotic matter. Most matter in this Universe consists of protons, neutrons and electrons. However, protons and neutrons are comprised of triplets of quarks.
This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table. (You could form elements that had radically different natures. There'd be no neutrons, for example, so no isotopes. A nucleus would be kept stable with a mix of positively and negatively-charged particles, with the net charge being something really bizare.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I got to see a presentation by one of the lead physicists working on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colider) 3 or 4 years ago. Follows is as much as I can remember about it and quark gluon plasma (disclaimer: I have been out of the physics community for 2 years now, so some of my quantum may be rusty)
In order to create quark gluon plasma you need a lot of energy. Most colliders work on the principle of getting light ions (like stripped helium atoms) and making them go really fast. RHIC decided that what would be more useful is to take really heavy ions (E = mc^2) and collide them. The will be using stripped gold atoms. (When I say stripped, I mean they got every electron off of them, all 79 of them) The have the two streams going in oppisite directions till they get up to speed, then ram them into each other.
I'm going to butcher anything else I say about this, so go check out this cern page for more info on quark gluon plasma. It has a really cool animation on their main page showing the collision.
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies or vampires anyway.
With people attempting to patent parts of the human gene the boys at Cern could go one better. After all they can claim a patent on the Universe, no person has ever created a universe or its basic parts before so there is no prior art.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Thanks to your post, a monkey was shot out of a cannon and caught in a net, then the net was lowered into a container of hydrochloric acid.
Bah. Bake in my day I was creating miniature big bangs before I had the muscle strength to crawl out of my crib.
Here it is on BBC
d _636000/636886.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Terms such as gas, solid, liquid and plasma relate to the arrangement of atoms and molecules. In this new state, atoms, or even protons and neutrons don't even exist. They are broken down into their constituent parts, i.e. quarks and gluons. Jeff
stty erase ^H
Quark-Gluon Plasma (as seen on TV)
Quark-Gluon Plasma brand glue is the product of space-age technology. It is excellent for bonding all forms of matter together, porous or non-porous. If you need to bond matter, we have the gluon for you!
This amazing product of atom smashing is yours for the low low price of $19.20.
(Keep away from children, oxygen, and other gaseous metalloids. Store in a cold (10K), dark, highly compressed place. If product is imbibed, rinse with talc, and self-immolate quickly. Use only in a well-ventilated noble gas atmosphere.)
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The particle-collision images there are pretty cosmic, although they look like something out of Fractint. Check out the animations too!
Also, it will be interesting to see whether Cern even budges under the Slashdot effect... I think not.
The article seems to be suggesting that you can actually see/detect the existance of these quark things... maybe i'm not reading this thoroughly enough but they don't seem to be mentioning how they actually detected these quark things. All it says is that, in so many words, you blast the crap outta sth to heat it up big time and little quarks separate from the atoms...
I'm quite keen to know how they detected these little quarks spraying off
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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That's what it says at the top, and the layout is screwed.
I mean, the man has problems with some of the more interesting interpretations of QT and all.
also (is it just me?) but what is this bs about the big bang.
As a theory it is useless, it answers nothing. "So the universe started with a big bang? What came before that?"
Call me naive, but the universe had no beginning and has no end, it is infinite in all directions and contains an infinite amount of 'dimensions' (current theory has 11 I am told). To believe anything else is futile
But, on the off-chance it -is- soup, I'll have a cup, with some cheese and a slice of bread, please.
Presumably you could have fun naming any bigger particles that may exist in the soup, how about croutons and noodleons.
EZ
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"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Agreed. And even if this doesn't end up being primordial soup, they just might have hit on the recipe for Twinkie(c) filler. :)
Erm, excuse me. But wasn't there an infinitesimal risk of generating 'Strange Matter' by mistake? I'm no physicist, but I thought strange matter could drop local space into a lower energy state. Thus causing lots of problems for just about everyone within a few parsecs, if not more.
I happen to live in Geneva, where the CERN is.
Whilst the discoveries they did there are, IMHO, really great and important regarding our knowledge of Life, The Universe and Everything, some factors are hidden for the benefits of Big Science (tm).
The CERN uses a Large Electron Collider which is 27 kilometers in circumference. The nasty fact is the leukemia rate in the (populated) areas above and around the particle accelerator is no less than 19 times higher than in the rest of the region.
Why did they build the 3 accelerators/colliders (two circlar ones and one linear) in a very populated area? Gee, that's just like having a nuclear plant downtown... I think that something our dear big brains should think about before "ordering" the next super particle accelerator.
Does anybody have some kind of information regarding other big accelerators located in dense population areas and leukemia/cancer rates? Usually, this kind of info is angrily kept secret by the authorities, but who knows...
Max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I very seriously question the idea that science should be done by issuing statements to the press. If the experimenters at CERN wanted to state their case for the production of Quark-gluon Plasma, it would be taken much more seriously as a series of peer-review articles. I suspect most physicists don't take "science by press release" very seriously, after the lessons taught by the Pons & Fleischman fiasco.
I suspect that there is enormous political and financial pressure on CERN to make some sort of public announcement to pacify European funding agencies; at least I hope that's the case. Otherwise, why bother with science? Just call a press conference and spin the evidence to the journalists that show.
or is hawking determinist scum? - I don't know about that. He presents his ideas and theories in an extraordinary and concise way. I think that his ideas have revolutionised Physice (perhaps not for us scientists) but rather for the layman. A Brief History of Time is a must for anyone with no scientific background.
I am not challenging your point as I have never met the man?? From where are you coming from with this. I wish you have of elaborated your point I am quite interested in what others outside the "orthodoxy" feel about Hawking...
"So the universe started with a big bang? What came before that?"
If the universe started with a singularity it is almost impossible (according to what I can remember from 1st year physics) to determine anything (please correct me if I am wrong anybody I always am keen to be corrected and therefore learn more...)
Science can only work on quantifiable data and singularities fall into the unquantifiable category I do believe. My Proffessor told me it was the job of philosophy and religion to give us these details because if you can't measure it or quantify it or falsify your findings how can it possibly be called "SCIENCE". Therefore I think your point is alittle moot.
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
They wouldn't be able to market it as a Universe. I'm pretty sure God has a registered trademark on that.