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Visiting the Big Bang
DarkKnightRadick writes "An article at the NYTimes.com (Free reg) is reporting that researchers in Long Island, NY are attempting to create the quark-gluon plasma that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, when the universe was just the size of a marble or grapefruit. "Sam Aronson was perched a few stories up on a metal catwalk, surrounded by tons of Russian steel and Japanese electronics, and enough wires to impress even Con Ed, when he paused to say what really interested him about the $600 million machine. Time, he said. More precisely, the beginning of time, just after the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago.""
Enjoy your Reg free link.
y sical/14COLL.html?ets
http://archives.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/science/ph
No Reg required
CERN has also been trying to produce a quark/gluon plasma (and may have already done it).
Googling only turns up articles of questionable use. You can find better information in their list of experiments, and maybe a summary elsewhere on the CERN web site.
here, here, and here.
Extra URLs you would have seen if I was posted :-(
p ://www.star.bnl.gov/STAR/rhicworkshop/final-wo rk.pdf
http://www.star.bnl.gov/STAR/rhicworkshop/
htt
Some fun stuff - the detectors (stories tall)are essentially front ends to circuits that need to sort and detect events happening at a significant fraction of c, discriminate between crap (eg cosmic ray events and glancing hits) and what they were aiming for (collisions).
"The next round of RHIC experiments will have larger data volumes per event and
larger event rates... in each case, about an order of magnitude greater than the present
values. This is similar to the environment faced by the LHC ALICE detector. As a base
model, it is assumed that the upgraded RHIC detectors will record ~1MB/event; the
Level-0 triggers will accept events at a rate of 25 KHz; and that data can be archived at a
rate of 250 MB/sec."
So you before you can say not much remember these are circuits weighing tons a hundred+ feet tall that need to be synchronised with the collisions in the beam, amazingly reliable and put up with a large amount of abuse (hard radiation when it leaks from the guts of the device).
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Throwing more money at the problem is not going to necessarily fix it. I have heard this argument before about non-fossil based fuels. Don't get me wrong, I am all for it. But doubling the budget is not going to make it happen in half the time- it's not linear like that. Throwing a whole boatload of money won't either- keep in mind that only a limited number of scientists and engineers are working on it now. Particle Physicist Joe isn't about to change research interests when he's close to tenure just because that is where the funding is supposed to go.
"The "inflationary" model was sort of a hack to make the theory agree with the observations. No actual reason for what starts it has been proposed AFAIK."
Yes, you are right about the hack part, but inflationary theory explains why our universe has an omega so close to 1 and why apparently disconnected parts of the cosmic microwave background have similiar temperatures. As for the reason it starts, well, there are plenty of ideas, but none of them easily testable (and I can't remember what they were, but they were all very high energy fields breaking indegeneracy...anyone care to comment?).
Alan Guth wrote a book called "The Inflationary Universe" (admittedly he came up with the idea) which gives a very clear explanation why inflation theory seems more suited than many other alternate theories.
"Who is to say that we might not accidentally create a sort of "mini-inflation" at one of these accelerators, thereby destroying the Earth, the Solar System, or even more. Nobody knows what triggered inflation. What if we do it accidentaly?"
A good question, and it was considered seriously by Martin Rees, a famous astrophysicist now at Cambridge. He did calculations showing that cosmic rays many thousands of times more energetic than the best we can do with earthly accelerators routinely hit our upper atmosphere. Given that billions of years of cosmic ray bombardment have not triggred a new universe type of scenario, it is probably safe to say that our experiments won't trigger one off.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed!
Dr Fish