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.""

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[Anonymous Coward]

Not trying to whore here, just being helpful:

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Reg free link

[shao2k2]

Enjoy your Reg free link.

http://archives.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/science/phy sical/14COLL.html?ets

Re:Reg free link

[Sylver Dragon]

Thank you.

And the Google Partner link..

[Anonymous Coward]

No Reg required

CERN's also been working on this.

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

Like an old shoe....

[Kibo]

It's always nice to see this continuing story make it to the mainstream media from time to time.

I wouldn't be opposed to something like a half hour or hour special, really.

But every now and then if I watch my local neighborhood college channel, they have this old MIT physics lecture series which coincidently featers one of the researchers involved with this. The last lecture of the series, he talks a lot about the project, as a send off to his students. My college professors were rarely so engaging.

I can't help but be in awe of the incredible might of our intellect. That the minds of men were are able to fling heavy nuclei together bringing the temperature of a little pocket of space to two trillion degrees (at temperatures that great units are almost irrelivant, but K), pushing the hands of time back, esentially, to the moment of our universe's conception, is why we have words like 'brilliant', 'awesome', and 'incredible'.

That I should be fortunate enough to live in a society that permits an average Joe, such as myself, to understand the mechanics of such a feat in qualitative terms, even if the quantitative methodes elude me, is truly a blessing. That a majority of my people seem to think creationism should be taught in schools, tells me too few of my countrymen take advantage of it.

Re:Like an old shoe....

[Kibo]

While not exactly generalizable to all Americans, the last poll I saw (major web site, doesn't make ballot stuffing easy, and there are all sorts of biases that would need to be accounted for) something like 60% thought creationism should be taught along with evolution. More thought evolution should be taught. If I was going to draw conclusions, I would conclude that most people (who took that poll) are undecided, and hedging their bets. That's sad. Creationism isn't a search for answers it's an excuse to not look for them. Faith has it's place, pretending to be fact isn't it.

While the puzzle, as you point out, is far from complete, we should encourage the innovative investigation of the questions that remain, as opposed to endorsing magic.

I might remind you that empircal evidence in support of a 'flat earth', as people so unwisely yet frequently remark, was limited to, "It looks more or less flat to me." By the time people got around to actually conducting experiments designed to test that assumed hypothesis, they discovered not only that the earth was round, but that it was big. I might also note, that the people most fond of creationism took a few extra millenia to pick up that handy bit of information.

Your example, far from being a call to tolerance is a call to arms. A cry for better education.

And here I thought I was saying something no one could disagree with. That'll teach me to share my wonder at man's achivements and my lament that not everyone chooses to share in them.

Re:Like an old shoe....

[BCGlorfindel]

Your example, far from being a call to tolerance is a call to arms. A cry for better education.

My example most certainly is not a call to tolerance. It is a call to open minded approachs to the scientific process, particularly when it is being to taught to students.

I would conclude that most people (who took that poll) are undecided
You'll note I made no claims that creationism should be taught alongside evolution. I referred instead to these undecided people you speak of. I was merely suggesting that this group of people's indecision may be attributable to being torn between evolution being taught as a theory vs. as a fact. Not people on the fence of creationism being taught in class.

Anything we teach to students 'as fact', particularly before post secondary education, has a big impact on how they think about and interpret the evidence they see. I was merely stating that we need to be very carefull were we draw that line. We are not necassarily doing science a disservice by not promoting common descent to 'fact' prematurely.

The theory of evolution covers a pretty broad range of theories and I think this is were in a lot of the indecision among people comes in. Evolution as simply genetic change in a population over time isn't too hard to show as an observable fact. But just how far that change can be extrapolated, and how well the evidence supports that possiblity is another far more debated issue.

For example, if a science teacher taught his class it is a fact that all creatures came from an individual type of single celled ancestor, it could leave abiogenesis running off in false directions. It can close people's minds to the chance that maybe two or 3 types of original single celled creatures started things off. There are a lot of negative side effects that come from teaching students at a young age things as fact which could well be shown as a wrong theory down the road.

I suppose my disagreement comes in drawing a line between wondering at our achievements, and arrogantly believing that all our answers must be the right ones. If we take that wonder too far and lower our standards for what it takes to elevate theory to fact we could well hinder feature scientific minds.

While the puzzle, as you point out, is far from complete, we should encourage the innovative investigation of the questions that remain, as opposed to endorsing magic.

My point precisely, I wasn't endorsing magic I was encouraging innovative thought which could well be hindered by over eager high school teachers over stepping the bounds of theory and fact.

Sounds like a superhero/villain origin story.

[Mirkon]

"...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."

A freak accident in the laboratory led to the spill of this quark-gluon plasma on an unfortunate researcher, turning him into...

Quark-Gluon Man!

Faster than a speeding universal boundary
More powerful than a supernova
Able to create dimensions within a single bound

Re:Sounds like a superhero/villain origin story.

[Bowling Moses]

...and able to graduate with a Ph.D. in less than four years!

Re:Sounds like a superhero/villain origin story.

[DrLudicrous]

Quark-Gluon Man! Master of the Strong Nuclear Force! Charming, yet Strange, he flies Up and Down, seeking Truth and Beauty wherever he collides!

More on CERN's claim

[Peter T Ermit]

here, here, and here.

Bewolf and overclocking trolls please note

[tqft]

Extra URLs you would have seen if I was posted :-(

http://www.star.bnl.gov/STAR/rhicworkshop/
http ://www.star.bnl.gov/STAR/rhicworkshop/final-wo rk.pdf

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).

Re:Bewolf and overclocking trolls please note

[mnmn]

I really think the data per session was 1TB. This was last time I visited, when they had just started gold nucleuses. Maybe after filtering and compression it comes down to 1GB?

Re:600 Million!!

[DrLudicrous]

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.

Re:Ummmm -- has anybody considered the posibilitie

[Doctor Fishboy]

"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

They were smashing gold nucleuses a while ago...

[mnmn]

I went down there, right up to the gate of BNL and requested a visit. The guards denyed entry, but after a bit of whining and .5 hr wait, got me a German scientist in a little car to show me around.

Good to see security was tighter than SUNY Stonybrook. I remember walking into their radiation area without a hinderance, badging myself a radiation detector and taking a tour among the huge tanks, and old books on fission and fusion...

Anyway, in BNL, the guy took me to the Star detector area, and we met a Russian scientist who showed me the data capture machinery. The detector is connected with 10,000s of yellow ethernet-like wires in very thick bundles and entering an area where rows over rows of shelves contained custimzed cards where the cables ended. Looked MASSIVELY parallel. I think the cards (size of 1u server each) had buffers to hold the data, that then got serially taken away and compressed into ANOTHER building that did nothing but crunch data. Sadly that computer building was closed.

Later we went to his office in the theory department. There are several theoretical groups from 5 ppl to sometimes over 100. They join their heads against specific problems and the whole thing results in boring papers. But this guy had Linux on a nice VaLinux machine, running X and I think WordPerfect, and lots of proprietary apps. Oh yeah I saw Mathematica. They all know that app.

Working on now to get qualifications to be able to work there. Ive always hated corporate life. :)