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Rocking with RHIC
Pete (big-pete) writes "Scienceblog carries a copy of an article which describes some unexpected results found when Physicists started slamming gold atoms together at high speeds. The resulting temperature was tens of thousands of times hotter than the cores of the hottest stars, but the resulting stream of particles did not behave as predicted. The original article is also available from the University of Rochester's news site here."
Considering how many similar prior collisions there have been in the history of the universe, this doesn't sounds like a rational prediction.
Probably a scare rumor started by a neighbor worried that the big atom smasher would goof up his TV reception.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
A bit denser, but much more accurate story about RHIC is here.
Nowadays there are protests every time a new accelerator starts up.
They actually had to write up an enviromental impact statement outlining how unlikely it was that our explorations might destroy the universe. IIRC. I think they predicted that something 5000 lead lead collisions of a similar nature occure every year in the universe. Heh. Humans rock. We beat that by a million times in the breifest of moments. I like to think that's where my tax dollars went.
I'm completely out of my depth, but as I understand the experiment the really vast gold atoms don't behave like billard balls. They are little pancaked discs that have this swarm of virtual particles around them, and when two of these atoms approach each other those swarms interact. That interaction sort of drags on the atoms stealing a little of their kinetic energy. But the atoms are movie so fast they out run this virtual reaction. So there's this little pocket of space that gets that extra energy, a lot of extra energy for it's volume. It ends up being heated to something like 2 trillion degrees, and we get to recreate yet another state of matter (three states my ass!). Not to mention getting a chance to push the universes clock back to something on the order of the first trillionth of a second, or even earlier!
That's just cool.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=strangele t
(The link works, for some reason, Slashdot put a space in the link's description.)
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Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others! - Kodos
[A strangelet is] a substance formed when present energy is sufficient to allow quarks and gluons to overcome the strong nuclear force and become uniform matter.
Nope. The strong nuclear force isn't overcome at all. A strangelet is a substance formed by with an equal mix of up, down, and strange quarks. The whole mess is bound by gluons (which carry the strong force). Strange matter is, in theory, at a lower energy state than ordinary nuclear matter.
The strangelet itself is a possibility of quark matter which occurs when an up quark and down quark combine to form a strange quark, one that does not exist under normal conditions. If a large number of these transformations occured at the same time, a strangelet could be formed: quark matter consisting entirely of strange quarks. Nope, and nope. Up and down quarks don't combine to form strange quarks. A strange quark is formed via the weak nuclear force -- either an up or a down quark turns into a strange quark, a lepton, and an antilepton (if I've managed to keep my Feynman daigrams straight). And strangelets are made of up, down, and strange quarks, not just strange quarks.
There are other basic mistakes, but I figured I'd correct at least the definition of strange matter.