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.

Comments

Official Page

[sash]

Lots of TV operators and media people around, here at CERN today.

Please go and check the official web pages: A New State of Matter

Re:Big bang?

[jd]

Close, but not quite. Steven Hawking's new theory is that there is no meaningful time 0, and therefore no singularity. Rather, space/time increasingly curve, when going back in time - similar to a y=x^(2n) function, where n is any integer number.

That way, the further you go back in time, the smaller the Universe gets, but it never reaches a single point. As t approaches 0, the gradient approaches 0.

The practical upshot is that, whilst the theory still says there was a Big Bang, there is no definable -point- for time 0.

Primordial soup, et al.

[jd]

Actually, it's not primordial soup. Unless Fred Hoyle knew something the rest of the world didn't, when he wrote "The Black Cloud".

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.)