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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."
This may seem like a stupid question to some of you, but how do you measure the temperature of an atom?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
GM Jesse twitched and farted in his sleep. Next to him lay Susie Anne Lou, the GM plant-slut and all around bar whore. She was 42. She was also awake.
"Jesse, wake up," she hissed, her voice like sandpaper from years of a 5-pack-a-day smoking habit. "Wake up you fat son of a bitch!"
Stirring and mumbling something about "polishing his knob like a good little slut," GM Jesse awoke slowly. He winced as had fallen asleep with his cheap sunglasses on again and inadvertantly shoved them into his face in a failed attempt to wipe the sleep from his eyes.
"What the fuck!?" he exclaimed as he groggily looked around. He gasped as he saw Susie Anne Lou; he had forgotten that he had "seduced" (bought her 7 beers at the bar) and fucked her earlier that night. He had been dreaming about Sarah Jessica Parker's perky Jewish tits and her shaven Jewish pussy. He had "messed her pussy up" all night long in his dream and waking up to Susie Anne Lou was in sharp contrast to his fantasy.
"You were snoring and farting. You God-damned pig, I don't expect to deal with shit-smell and grunting after I fuck," Susie Anne Lou said pointedly. "God dammit!"
Without hesitation, GM Jesse bitchslapped Susie Anne Lou. "Fuckin' cunt, God-damn bitchin' an' whinin' after I got my balls in you," he berated. "Next time you want this God-damned meat pole you're gonna get down on your knees and kiss my balls first, you fuckin' hag!"
The next morning, Susie Ann Lou, the GM plant-slut, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was GM Jesse's guitar (untouched since '78), his Journey records (last listened to yesterday), his beer (all 5 cases of it, chilled), and a stack of porno mags (Open Legs, Hustler, and Shaved).
"Fuckin' slut stole all my shit, God dammit!" GM Jesse exclaimed angrily. "Fuckin' fuck-hole walked off with all my favotire shit!"
He grabbed his jean jacket and waddled out the door. It was a warm summer morning in Kansas City and he was wearing his finest red cut-off jogging pant shorts, a stained white tshirt, and a flannel shirt overtop of that. His shoes were imitation leather with Velcro straps. GM Jesse didn't have time to fuck around with tyin' his shoes!
His belly hung out from his tshirt, and though he didn't notice, his dirty cock was hanging limply from a hole he had cut in the front of his jogging pant cut-off shorts so he woulnd't have to pull them down to piss. He'd done this while trying to piss in a beer bottle in his reclining chair late one Wednesday night. It was quite hard to piss in a beer bottle sitting down with your dick aimed down and over the top of an elastic band!
His '78 Sedan stationwagon peeled out of his driveway and down the gravelly road toward I-70 and the GM plant.
His buddies from the line were drinking in the parking lot before work, per tradition every work day, and he didn't want to be late.
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.
:)
Considering that one of the predictions, if I remember correctly, was the possibility of creating a new vaccum state that would rocket out from the earth at the speed of light destroying all the universe that lay in it's path... I'm pretty relieved that the behavior was a little different than expected.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
despite the offtopic mod, this post is definitely worth 5!
A bit denser, but much more accurate story about RHIC is here.
I guess all those alchemists who thought that adding fire to metal would make gold were right after all...
And for a complete waste of time, go play alchemy.
free ipod? yeah.
it's probably not a problem.. probably.. but I'm showing a small discrepancy in.. well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining sequence.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"When we first presented this at a conference in Stony Brook, the audience couldn't believe it," says Manly. "They said, 'This can't be. You're violating boost invariance.'" And boost invariance was my favorite theory! How sad to see it slammed. ;-(
R.I.P. B.I.
Made with massively parallel wetware.
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.
>> For years scientits and crazy people have been trying to turn gold into metal.
Now THAT's a job I would like! Just mail my check to P.O. Box...