Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma

Martin writes "A series of presentations and a press conference was held today at Brookhaven National Laboratory about new results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The latest run was finished only a few weeks ago. The results are a new milestone in the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, a new state of nuclear matter. The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL and in Japan and France, with the biggest cluster of about 1100 dual-CPU nodes located at the RHIC Computing Facility. It's nice to see that results are out so soon after the data were taken. There were previous stories about RHIC on /., here(1), here(2) and here(3)."

Comments

Recent events

[mao che minh]

Here is a cool slideshow about the subject from 2000, when the theory was "complete speculation". And here is an article from Sciecne Watch that was written in 2001, when it was considered "somehwat speculative". There wasn't much news about it in 2002. And now, we have this story in 2003.

Pretty cool.

Re:Recent events

[Anonymous Coward]

Karma whore!

We want pictures - here is what RHIC looks like from above-

http://www.agsrhichome.bnl.gov/Images/RHIC.jpg

Re:Recent events

[SexyAlexie]

Oh my Ghod, that looks like *that* goatse.cx photograph!

Re:Recent events

[jafuser]

Just curious.. wouldn't it be more efficient if it were closer to a perfect circle?

Re:Recent events

[etcshadow]

QGP "complete speculation" in 2000?!?!? I was learning about it in courses in 1999, where it was discussed as all but fact. I mean, just because something has yet to be detected doesn't mean that the scientific comunity doesn't accept its probable eventuality. There's nothing in the theory that seems outlandish, apart from the incredibly high energy you need to produce it, and the difficulty in detecting something so new and short-lived.

Applications?

[krisp]

Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe is facinating and all, but , what are the practicle applications for this research? How will it benifit mankind?

Re:Applications?

[The Only Druid]

Offhand-

This sort of physics is relevant to nanotechnology (and the subsequent issues of high-volume micromanufacture, etc.), as well as possibly energy resources (i.e. ZPF if that bears out, etc.).

Re:Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Without fully understanding the universe, we canâ(TM)t know how truly irrelevant we are.

Re:Applications?

[ciroknight]

It's likely we will never see the benifits of the research we do now. That's just how it seems to go. But in the 23rd century, it may be used to do just about anything........... ;) (Tachyons here we come...)

Re:Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

i did my ph.d. in particle physics and this question gets asked many, many times. the typical answer from physicists would pull up something like a tv as an example - the electron tube developed by physicists is the basis for CRT... i don't, however, buy this notion. the easiest answer would be to say, all this is (almost) useless from practical point of view. it's purely for knowledge. anything practical that might come of fundamental research is a lucky by-product. to some people, knowledge is everything. to others, not so. while it may seem a bit unfair that the tax money is spent so "those who seek knowledge for the sake of it" can (it's more like a hobby to them...), i personally think it's for a novel cause.

Re:Applications?

[Auckerman]

Sometimes applications of knowledge are either completely nonobvious or impossible to do at the time of the discovery. This is something people need to accept. Much like GPS was impossible to do even after we understood relativity, we may not see the practical results of this or any other fundamental research well into this century.

Re:Applications?

[dissy]

> what are the practicle applications for this research?
> How will it benifit mankind?

Same way as the discovery and learning about the electron and the proton and the photon and the quark...

How all of those benifited mankind I'll leave for you to look into :)

Re:Applications?

[Bootsy Collins]

Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe is facinating and all, but , what are the practicle applications for this research?

Need it have a "practical application"?

How will it benifit mankind?

Well, that's a very different question.

I don't think this will have any practical value, per se. Absolutely zero. Oh, it's possible that down the road someone much cleverer than I will come up with something. In fact, that's the normal way in which major technological advances have occurred. For instance, when Schottky began studying the quantum behavior of transition metals, he wasn't interested in the tiniest bit in any sort of practical application; he just wanted to understand the implications of quantum mechanics for electrons inside certain solids. If you had asked at the time, "what's the practical benefit of this work?" the answer would have been "zippo." And yet pretty much all of modern technology is based upon the transisitor that was so discovered. That's the way it's always been. Michael Faraday didn't really see any public benefit to understanding electromagnetism, either. Pure research has historically been without such obvious benefit.

But nevertheless, I don't want to suggest that that's the eventual result here, because I don't believe it will be. I think that would be disingenuous of me. I highly doubt that an improved understanding of the history of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present will ever produce any wonderful and amazing technological advance. To me, the motivation is simply that understanding and knowledge -- especially of something like how the Universe got to be the way it is, and why it works the way it does -- is inherently a good thing. It has value by definition. Perhaps my least favorite thing about our society is that we are trained to evaluate the worth of things in terms of their economic value. Just like love, understanding has its own value, in my mind -- bereft of any "practical" value.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star. Only elements as heavy as carbon or lighter can be formed in the early universe; for heavier elements, you need a star. Now, if you didn't already know this, stop and think about it for a second. A huge chunk of you, perhaps all of you, was inside a star at one time. It appears that you and I are star debris. And it gets even better. The way that large amounts of these elements, forged within a star, can get out of the star is if the star supernovas -- dies at the end of its lifetime with a big boom. That big boom also serves to make very heavy elements -- such as uranium, for instance -- that cannot be made even in a star while it's burning away. There's uranium, and other similar very heavy elements, on our planet. Do you see what I'm getting at? Much of the atoms that make all of us up, that make this planet up, were at one time inside a star (or stars) that lived its life, supernovaed, and spewed out its stellar debris with heavy elements. Eventually, maybe a few hundred million years later, that stuff is part of our planet, part of our atmosphere, our water, part of you and me. We are all brothers and sisters; we all came from the same place, sorta.

Now, that knowledge will never make me any money. It will never have any practical benefit in my life. And yet, I consider myself immensely richer for knowing it.

Understanding has its own value.

Re:Applications?

[orthogonal]

Now, that was a post.

Mod parent up, please.

Re:Applications?

[El]

This research will be absolutely essential when we set about to create our own universes!

Re:Applications?

[uberdave]

GPS and Relativity? The two are unrelated as far as I know. Although satelite navigation relies on time beacons, relativistic effects due to the velocity of the satelites, or the gravitational field differences, should be insignificant and irrelevant. Please enlighten me.

Re:Applications?

[azav]

Best post I've read all year. Kudos Bootsy.

Re:Applications?

[ravenousbugblatter]

All knowledge has the potential to benefit mankind. Just because we can't see an obvious use now doesn't mean there isn't one.

Re:Applications?

[Auckerman]

The difference in the gravitational field of person and the satellites skews the GPS results somewhat. One needs to compensate for this to have a useable result for GPS.

Re:Applications?

[__aagmrb7289]

Having recently read an amazing book called "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, the answer to this is very simple: what advantage do we get from understanding exactly how everything in the universe exists, and why? What use is it understanding exactly how things work? That is what this information will help us discover. Think we might be able to apply knowledge like that? I'm hoping these questions are rhetorical - if they aren't, and you consider yourself an engineer, well, please reconsider.

Re:Applications?

[greg_barton]

Understanding has its own value.

Yet another example of "geek words to live by." :)

Re:Applications?

[cens0r]

Read this link to answer your questions. To sum this up, the clocks in the satellites don't record the same time as those on earth, because of relativity.

Re:Applications?

[xv4n]

No doubt a similar question was asked when the LASER was invented. =)

Re:Applications?

[LuckyStarr]

i'm not sure that tachyons are real. some of the string-theories predict that there is no such particle.

Re:Applications?

[ErfC]

Hear, hear! (Here, here? I can never remember.)

Richard Feynmann also put it well:

Science is like sex: occasionally something useful comes out of it, but that's not why we do it.

Re:Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a little too quick to dismiss the possibility of potential practical applications down the road. "Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe" in itself may not have any applications, but in the process we gain a better understanding of the strong interaction (or strong force), which is responsible for holding the atomic nucleus together, and for processes such as nuclear fusion, which powers the sun, and some nuclear fission reactions. The theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics, is the least well understood among all fundamental interactions. Formation of quark-gluon plasma is one consequence of this theory, which has not yet been verified experimentally and may or may not be correct. (There are also other aspects of the theory that are still in dispute.)

To say that improving our knowledge of a fundamental force of nature through testing its predictions will not contribute to future advances is to ignore the history of science. People said similar things about electromagnetism just over a century ago.

Re:Applications?

[Bootsy Collins]

You are a little too quick to dismiss the possibility of potential practical applications down the road.

I don't dismiss it; that is, I don't say it's impossible. What I say that I don't believe it'll happen. Put another way: it's possible, but I really, really doubt it.

"Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe" in itself may not have any applications, but in the process we gain a better understanding of the strong interaction (or strong force), which is responsible for holding the atomic nucleus together, and for processes such as nuclear fusion, which powers the sun, and some nuclear fission reactions.

Hmmm. Can you elaborate on how an improved understanding of QCD at temperatures above 200 MeV is going to teach us much about fission or fusion, processes that occur at typical particle energies of 1-10 MeV. In the case of fission, or understanding the internals of heavy nuclei, my (perhaps wrong) understanding of the status of lattice gauge calculations was that issues of the quark-gluon coupling at those lower energies weren't where the uncertainties lie. Or is that incorrect?

The theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics, is the least well understood among all fundamental interactions.

No, gravity is the least well understood among all fundamental interactions. But it's definitely true that QCD is the least well understood part of the Standard Model.

To say that improving our knowledge of a fundamental force of nature through testing its predictions will not contribute to future advances is to ignore the history of science. People said similar things about electromagnetism just over a century ago.

As a general rule, I agree. In fact, I said exactly this in the first full paragraph of the post to which you just replied.

Re:Applications?

[squiggleslash]

Besides, the CRT is the basis of the television. If it wasn't for the CRT, we wouldn't have TV (shaddup John Logie Baird, I'm trying to make a point here.)

So clearly the discovery and harnessing of the electron hasn't always been a benefit for mankind...

Re:Applications?

[Manic Ken]

It's early (or late..)for me but this is not what I read:
from the metaresearch link:

2. What relativistic effects on GPS atomic clocks might be seen? General Relativity (GR) predicts that clocks in a stronger gravitational field will tick at a slower rate. Special Relativity (SR) predicts that moving clocks will appear to tick slower than non-moving ones. Remarkably, these two effects cancel each other for clocks located at sea level anywhere on Earth. So if a hypothetical clock at Earthâ(TM)s north or south pole is used as a reference, a clock at Earthâ(TM)s equator would tick slower because of its relative speed due to Earthâ(TM)s spin, but faster because of its greater distance from Earthâ(TM)s center of mass due to the flattening of the Earth. Because Earthâ(TM)s spin rate determines its shape, these two effects are not independent, and it is therefore not entirely coincidental that the effects exactly cancel. The cancellation is not general, however. Clocks at any altitude above sea level do tick faster than clocks at sea level; and clocks on rocket sleds do tick slower than stationary clocks. For GPS satellites, GR predicts that the atomic clocks at GPS orbital altitudes will tick faster by about 45,900 ns/day because they are in a weaker gravitational field than atomic clocks on Earth's surface. Special Relativity (SR) predicts that atomic clocks moving at GPS orbital speeds will tick slower by about 7,200 ns/day than stationary ground clocks. Rather than have clocks with such large rate differences, the satellite clocks are reset in rate before launch to compensate for these predicted effects. In practice, simply changing the international definition of the number of atomic transitions that constitute a one-second interval accomplishes this goal. Therefore, we observe the clocks running at their offset rates before launch. Then we observe the clocks running after launch and compare their rates with the predictions of relativity, both GR and SR combined. If the predictions are right, we should see the clocks run again at nearly the same rates as ground clocks, despite using an offset definition for the length of one second. We note that this post-launch rate comparison is independent of frame or observer considerations. Since the ground tracks repeat day after day, the distance from satellite to ground remains essentially unchanged. Yet, any rate difference between satellite and ground clocks continues to build a larger and larger time reading difference as the days go by. Therefore, no confusion can arise due to the satellite clock being located some distance away from the ground clock when we compare their time readings. One only needs to wait long enough and the time difference due to a rate discrepancy will eventually exceed any imaginable error source or ambiguity in such comparisons.
Different effects cancel eachother?
Is this what I read. And (this is what I read some where else) we wouldnt do anything different if it we never had GR or SR.

Re:Applications?

[Dirtside]

Can I ask what your sig refers to ("Blizzard didn't invent the word, its a real religion.")? Just curious.

Re:Applications?

[confused one]

So, you can honestly say that having a better understanding of, say for example, QCD isn't worth the effort? And you say you have a Ph.D in particle physics?

I sincerely hope you're not teaching; because with an attitude like that, all of your students will be tainted with a distaste for advancing science.

Re:Applications?

[Idarubicin]

is sort of physics is relevant to nanotechnology (and the subsequent issues of high-volume micromanufacture, etc.)...

The physics of things on small scales--yes, very useful for nanomaterials science. The physics of a quark-gluon plasma--not so useful for materials science. It takes multibillion-dollar instruments to make and detect these plasmas; they won't be finding their way into micromanufacturing for a looong time.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is eventually useful. Almost all fundamental research has found an application after enough time has passed. (The stuff for which we haven't found an application probably just hasn't been around long enough.) Nanotechnology, though, isn't where quark-gluon plasmas will come in handy. Nanotech works at energies that are much too low, and on length scales that are much too large.

Re:Applications?

[Idarubicin]

What I read from that is that the clocks on the satellites operate with a slightly redefined notion of a 'second' to compensate for the effects of relativity. Further, for clocks on Earth's surface at sea level, the effects of special and general relativity coincidentally cancel, so that a clock at the pole will seem to run at the same rate as one on the equator. Fair enough, it means that everybody's second seems to be the same length, to an observer at sea level on the earth.

Nevertheless, someone had to be able to do the calculation for just what the adjusted second should be in the first place--this requires special and general relativity.

Further, there is a small discrepancy introduced due to relativity for observers not at sea level, or travelling at significant speeds. Presumably, a knowledge of SR and GR would be handy to account for these effects.

Having said that, we could indeed use GPS with no knowledge whatsoever of relativity. We would notice pretty quickly that atomic clocks aboard satellites seemed to drift, and we could come up with a completely empirical system to compensate. (Of course, this would lead to someone developing a theory of relativity...scientists abhor this sort of unsolved problem.)

Re:Applications?

[Manic Ken]

Great answer!
I'll spend some hours trying to find some reference (google) to the "time drifting" on satellites, and try to find how much that actually is, ie how much the clocks are actually beeing compensated.
Wish me good luck (or if anyone have a link..).

Re:Applications?

[Idarubicin]

Here's a link. I haven't checked his numbers, but they seem to be the right order of magnitude. The GR correction for being further up the gravity well speeds the clocks by an apparent 49 microseconds per day. (The GPS satellites are in a high orbit, with a period of about 12 hours.) The SR correction due to satellite motion slows the clocks by about 5 us per day.

So, the total correction is 44 us per day--the clocks must be slower by about half a part per billion. That's one second difference every sixty years.

Re:Applications?

[Manic Ken]

WOWIE ZOWIE!
Thats an informative link.Thanks.
I have slept less 5 hours the last 2 earth spins, so I am not myself, however, I dont see any referenses to the speed of the satellites in question? I am thinking two dimensional here, I am to tired to do ascii art here :( But everything may clear up after I have had some sleep. Zzzzz
This is how /. should be. Not some lame trolling by kids.

Re:Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

You been playing Photopia?

Re:Applications?

[stevelinton]

I believe that there are tables of special and general relatavistic corrections applied in GPS calculations. Otherwise you get errors in position on the order of 100-200 metres.

Re:Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what he said at all. He said it probably wouldn't have practical applications and if it did it would just be luck. It's you who then claimed that meant it wasn't worth the effort. He can see that sometimes impractical things are worth it, and you can't, so he'd make a better teacher than you.

Re:Applications?

[hesiod]

> clearly the discovery and harnessing of the electron hasn't always been a benefit for mankind

Quite right, but if it wasn't for the CRT, we would probably not have computers either. Well, at least personal computers.

Re:Applications?

[dpotop]

Practical results in advanced physics are rare, but of enormous impact. And the best example is the nuclear energy. Let the guys do the research, and in 100 years you will be able to travel at warp speed. :)

Re:Applications?

[Idarubicin]

This link has some more information. The satellites orbit at a nominal altitude of 20 200 km above the Earth's surface, in nearly perfectly circular orbits. Their orbital period is exactly 12 sidereal hours: 11 hours and 58 minutes to the rest of us. (My back of the envelope numbers start here...) Taking the Earth's radius to be 6300 km, the satellites cover 166 420 km twice daily, for an orbital velocity of 3900 meters per second (to two sig figs). The correction factor for special relativity at that velocity is sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) which comes out to about one part in ten billion--a handful of microseconds per day.

Re:Applications?

[Crazy Eight]

In what way can this exotic plasma be important to nanotech? I don't want to come off like a smart ass. I just can't see any obvious way that something which was stable for only 500 millionths of a second after Time-Zero at temperatures exceeding two trillion degrees centigrade could help in building, say, a turbine the size of a mitochondrion. Do you really think we aren't building such turbines today because we lack the physics? We don't need to build protons or nuclei. We need to take the ones we already have and rearange them.

Re:Applications?

[Crazy Eight]

Get off this guy's back. His attitude is perfectly reasonable in that it accounts for the fact that most people simply don't give a shit about particle physics. However much private joy he might feel in the intellectual exploration of Nature, he is mature and honest enough to realize that his curiosity is uncommon. He isn't slamming Science at all. He is calling it an end in itself.

Re:Applications?

[Darby]

i'm not sure that tachyons are real. some of the string-theories predict that there is no such particle.

I don't think more than 5 or 10 people ever actually thought they might exist.

Re:Applications?

[Darby]

Great post, but you clearly underestimate your own intelligence:

Oh, it's possible that down the road someone much cleverer than I will come up with something. In fact, that's the normal way in which major technological advances have occurred.

I'm sure there were lots of advances made by people less clever than you.
Try not to be too hard on yourself in the future ;-)

Scary Thought

[mgcsinc]

I know it's provincial, but there's just something scary about the thought of harnessing something, and I quote, "1,000,000,000,000 degrees" in temperature on earth...

Re:Scary Thought

[localghost]

Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, or Rankine?

Re:Scary Thought

[ciroknight]

The heat and pressure isn't actually harnested, we generate it by slamming two gold molecules together at a really high, relevistic speed. The idea is that we don't have to make high temperatures or pressures, but instead, have the molecules do it for us by colliding.

Re:Scary Thought

[Matey-O]

Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, or Rankine?

At 1e12, it wouldn't much matter.

Re:Scary Thought

[localghost]

1e12ÂF is 5.56e11ÂC. 1e12ÂC is 1.8e12ÂF. While any of those numbers could be accurately described as "fucking HOT", it still makes a difference. Whether it starts at absolute 0, or 273ÂK above 0 probably doesn't make any difference at this order of magnitude, though.

Re:Scary Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

two gold molecules

Never heard of those. I followed one link and it says gold ions.

Oh, wait, your the moron who posted the beowolf cluster joke.

Aren't you tired of those yet? I'd wish I could torture people who post them, but I'll have to stick to flaming.

Re:Scary Thought

[f97tosc]

1e12ÂF is 5.56e11ÂC. 1e12ÂC is 1.8e12ÂF. While any of those numbers could be accurately described as "fucking HOT", it still makes a difference.

That difference is false accuracy, because we are only dealing with one significant digit in 10^12 degrees.

In other words, it is no point in discussing differences of a factor of 2 when we only have information accurate to a factor of 10.

Tor

Re:Scary Thought

[shthd]

cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere release as much if not more energy than anything we've done in an experiment so far. I wouldn't loose any sleep over what RHIC does.

Re:Scary Thought

[xv4n]

>>"1,000,000,000,000 degrees" in temperature
> Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, or Rankine?
mod parent +1 Funny. :)

Re:Scary Thought

[localghost]

Whoever wrote that article is obviously not a scientist, because there are no units, and it's not in scientific notation. They're unlikely to care about significant digits. For all we know, the number as it was measured might have been 1.00000000000000000e12. Nobody writing an article would print that, though, so any information about how precise that number is has been lost.

Re:Scary Thought

[Alexis Brooke]

  ÂIf that's the case, then why are we building all these research facilities? Just send a guy up in a hot air balloon with a microscope and a thermometer and be done with it.

Re:Scary Thought

[Crazy Eight]

I wondered the same thing. Google led me to a page that claimed this plasma needs to be 2 trillion degrees Centigrade.

Re:Scary Thought

[shthd]

That's actually a good idea. It would be great to study cosmic rays and you would probably need to send a guy up in a balloon....or the ISS to do it. But, cosmic ray collisions are somewhat rare and definitely unpredictable. Plus the equipment used to study this stuff is HUGE; photomultipliers, magnets, power sources...etc. These experiments generate millions of collisions that take months to study. Even then, what they're looking for is a rare event. An interesting side note. Apollo astronauts reported occasionally seeing light flashes when they closed their eyes. Everyone scoffed. Turns out they were actually "seeing" cosmic rays. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mir_lights_0 30416.html

Gluons?

[grub]

I've heard of strap-ons, wouldn't a gluon hurt when removed?

disappointing

[Boromir son of Faram]

I was all excited about this at first, but it turns out that it's just a milestone in the search for quark-gluon plasma. I guess I'll have to put up with plain old photon-muon plasma for a couple more years.

BNL

[das_katz_socrates]

"The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL..."

Who would've thought that the musical group Bare Naked Ladies ran linux.

Re:BNL

[unicron]

*AT* BNL leads me to think of a place. *BY* BNL your joke might have been funny. Simply finding an anogram and substituting something else..doesn't cut it.

Re:BNL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it does. Twit!

Re:BNL

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if SCO is going to try to claim they own those gluons :)

Re:BNL

[beamdriver]

Interestingly enough, Brookhaven National Laboratory purchased bnl.org from the Bare Naked Ladies fan club.

Re:BNL

[billsoxs]

God you are boring - you must have a PhD in Physics

Re:IMAGINE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine there's no people...it's satisfying when they die...

what will this do?

[the_2nd_coming]

what new mysteries will this reveal about the make up of matter?

Re:what will this do?

[Abcd1234]

It's another test of the standard model of physics. If the results aren't as we expect, then the standard model will have to be revised (well, first you'd probably perform the experiment a few more times to verify the result :) in order to accomodate the new findings. It's the same reason scientists placed atomic clocks in orbit to test general relativity... it didn't reveal anything *new*, but it helped to further verify things we already *suspected*. The fact is, a theory is pretty meaningless unless you actually attempt to test its predictions...

Re:what will this do?

[annewinston]

Actually this is not just another test of the standard model. Those tests are done with simple systems (like proton-proton or electron-electron collisions). The gold-gold collisions here are a much more complicated system where studying the properties of the large thermalized soup of quarks and gluons is the issue. There is no complete model for explaining how all aspects of this system should behave. This is one of the more experimentaly driven areas of physics.

OK...

[TopShelf]

For a while as an undergrad I pursued a Physics major, but lost interest as it seemed that pursuits like this are basically the modern-day version of cavemen smashing rocks together and ogling over the results.

What, pray tell, could be the useful results of this research? I don't mean to be critical - I believe that there is far too little basic research going on these days. But where, ultimately, does this research lead?

Re:OK...

[crazyhelmut]

Thats up to engineers to figure out.

Re:OK...

[jandrese]

Isn't this the same thing they said about Lasers in the 50s?

Re:OK...

[Anonymous Coward]

"But where, ultimately, does this research lead?"

Oh, just to a fundamental understanding of the Universe and the particles that make it up. But that's not nearly as important as making cool computer games is it? Stupid rock smashing physicists!

Re:OK...

[warpSpeed]

But where, ultimately, does this research lead?

We will not know until we get there...

I believe that there is far too little basic research going on these days.

There is nothing more basic then finding out how all this matter/energy around us works.

Re:OK...

[Telastyn]

Well, let's see... One time the cavemen managed to smash certain rocks together and reliably get sparks -> fire. Pretty much the basis of civilization...

Re:OK...

[Thuktun]

For a while as an undergrad I pursued a Physics major, but lost interest as it seemed that pursuits like this are basically the modern-day version of cavemen smashing rocks together and ogling over the results.

Could many cavemen determine the underlying makeup of the smashed rocks by observing the size and trajectory of the collision products?

Re:OK...

[Mr. McGibby]

But where, ultimately, does this research lead?

Nobody knows. That's why it's called research.

True, the verification of a theory isn't really that world-changing, especially when the theory turns out to be correct. It's when an experiment shows that the theory is *incorrect* is when the world changes.

Take the experiments that showed the universe is speeding up. They were simply to try to refine the Hubble constant. No one would've seen that coming. In fact, one might have said, "Why bother ? We know the universe is expanding. How accurate does it need to be?!"

Re:OK...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then his neighbor saw the fire and duplicated his efforts, resulting in the invention IP lawers -> the destruction of civilization began.

Re:OK...

[Tiny Elvis]

-they could also smash rocks together and discover 'tools'--hammers, arrowheads, axes

-they could also smash (or melt) rocks and discover metals such as iron, copper, or tin..

All of this stuff was in fact quite important for the development of civilization as we know it..

Re:OK...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like all truely useful technologies, it will help us to kill ever larger numbers of people, with ever less effort. This is what seperates truely civilized people from those armed with rocks and pointy sticks.

I for one would rather be the one holding the gluon plasm death ray gun, rather than the pointy stick.

Re:OK...

[mhore]

What, pray tell, could be the useful results of this research? I don't mean to be critical - I believe that there is far too little basic research going on these days. But where, ultimately, does this research lead?

I think this is possibly why you lost interest in physics. We're not always interested in the APPLICATION of knowledge. Sometimes, we just like to know why a particular thing is like it is. We leave the application to the engineers and business men.

Re:OK...

[dlakelan]

Yes but lasers don't require megawatthours of electricity to generate. This sort of thing absolutely requires super high energies...

Therefore there will probably never be a commercial application to quark gluon plasma generation.

Of course it's possible that some quark-gluon plasma fusion reaction may be discovered that allows us to generate massive terawatt power plants the size of a volkswagen that run off lithium pellets or something, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

Fundamentally we know enough about physics in this region of the universe to know how much energy we can get from a certain quantity of mass (ie. e=mc^2) and to know the limitations of generating and distributing that energy (ie. conductivity of metals, and cooling requirements of superconductors). From our fundamental understanding of physics as we know it so far, we know that in order to do useful work you have to manipulate the electroweak force (ie. move electrons and atoms around). Fundamentally, all useful chemical reactions and intermolecular forces in our everyday world are electric phenomena. Now THAT's what I call neat physics.

If you want "Practical" you have to look to the engineering industry. They are the ones creating more efficient power plants, lower emissions engines, higher strength construction techniques, higher efficiency agriculture, and better water treatment systems.

Re:OK...

[zeno_2]

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

- Albert Einstein

Re:OK...

[red floyd]

Yes, but they weren't able to put frickin' LASERs on the heads of frickin' sharks until 20003.

Re:OK...

[aliens]

Basic research? If this is basic, what pray tell is complex? ::)

Often times where research will lead is unknown, seems people have to know nowadays what exactly the finish line is for research. If it's too open ended they'll dismiss it. Well, to those I'd like to point out that the reason for living is still quite open ended, so sit back and relax a lil bit, let those who want to think and explore do just that.

I'm sure someone will point out that often they're thinking and exploring with tax payer money, which is true. But at least they're working for the public, and not some private institution which might come up with something to benefit the public but only as a side note to benefitting the business first.

Re:OK...

[f97tosc]

modern-day version of cavemen smashing rocks together and ogling over the results.

This is actually a valid question, I am sure a lot of Joes and Janes out there are wondering the same thing. I'll try my best to give an answer that everyone should be able to understand.

First of all, most physics is much more applied, they deal with things like building superconductors, nanotechnology, lasers and other cool stuff with everyday applications.

However, for cutting edge basic research we are looking at things that are very small, much smaller than atoms. We don't have any tools to do cool stuff with this, we don't even know how it works. In other words, we have just found a new type of rock - but we are yet clueless about even the basic properties. Furthermore, all of our old rock-tools are useless. So what can we do? Well, we make the simplest possible experiment we can do, we bang them together and see what happens. Do they bounce? Fall into little pieces? Stick together? Explode? Make an interesting sound?

When we know this we can start thinking about how to apply our knowledge and construct tools accordingly.

But of course at that point, the basic researchers will have moved on to an even smaller level and will be smashing new rocks together and ogle over the results.

Tor

Re:OK...

[Anonymous Coward]

You got out of physics because high energy experiments seemed pointless? What about all the other zillion areas of physics?!?! This is just a tiny part of the field.

Re:OK...

[Guppy06]

"For a while as an undergrad I pursued a Physics major, but lost interest as it seemed that pursuits like this are basically the modern-day version of cavemen smashing rocks together and ogling over the results."

Translation: I learned there were no millionaire research physicists.

Re:OK...

[Idarubicin]

Yes but lasers don't require megawatthours of electricity to generate. This sort of thing absolutely requires super high energies...

Therefore there will probably never be a commercial application to quark gluon plasma generation.

First of all, I agree with you--it's unlikely that there will be a commercial application for a quark-gluon plasma anytime soon. The power requirements border on the ludicrous, and the scale of equipment is absurd.

Nevertheless, if you asked Theodore Maiman about his 'optical maser' in 1960, he probably wouldn't have anticipated every teenager in the country carrying a laser with them all day--powered by a pair of AA batteries. (How do you power the flashlamp? Where do you put it? How do these kids afford the little ruby that's the lasing medium? Oh, and what the hell is a CD?)

And you never know. Look at medicine. Devices like cyclotrons are becoming much more common in medical research facilities for creating short-lived isotopes. (I can think of at least three or four within a couple hours' drive from here.) There is talk of using synchrotron radiation--not to mention more exotic particles like pi mesons--for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Suppose there are parallel advances in high temperature superconducting magnets, and other tools of the particle collider trade. Perhaps you can make a quark-gluon plasma for a hundred million dollars rather than multiple billions. Suddenly the field becomes more accessible, and people will come up with all kinds of applications.

Re:OK...

[Zaak]

But where, ultimately, does this research lead?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

-- T S Eliot

Re:OK...

[TopShelf]

Where I was studying, it seemed the main focal point, and was the subject of the work-study job I had for a summer. Shortly after I graduated, the U started a highly-acclaimed program that places greater emphasis on exposing undergrads to a wide variety of research projects, which would have been a nice opportunity to explore those options! Ah, timing...

Re:OK...

[chrylis]

This sort of thing absolutely requires super high energies...

Interestingly enough, the only major power draw at RHIC itself is the refrigeration (which draws about 15MW when on)--the collider ring magnets themselves are superconducting. After that, the electronics draw the second most power.

Re:OK...

[GammaRay Rob]

Isn't this the same thing they said about Lasers in the 50s?

Don't you mean, "Lasers"?

"Quark-Gluon Plasma"

[GoofyBoy]

Give Star Trek writers a larger vocabulary.

"Captian, it will take at least an hour to clean the quantum-transductor of all residual Quark-Gluon plasma!"

Re:"Quark-Gluon Plasma"

[visualight]

This one doesn't seem to be in the catalogue of Start Trek Particles...

At least not yet.

Filter update overdue

[jabbadabbadoo]

Could someone please add the word "beowolf" to the friggin' lameness filter?

Re:Filter update overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

That wouldn't do much, since it's spelled "beowulf".

Re:Filter update overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of filtered "beowolfs"!

Imagine a mosix cluster of them!

Imagine an openMosix cluster of them!

Re:Filter update overdue

[Guppy06]

Could you imagine a cluster of these fighting Grendel?

Re:Filter update overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it would keep the flow of fun Beowulf jokes, and filter out grumpy old men like jabbadabbadoo (599681).

Applications ? Oh well...

[McSnarf]

...the most well-known example of pure science known to man is electricity. Why bother with something that can make frog's legs kick ?

Experience has shown that "pure" research often leads to applications the researchers never imagined.

Cutting research to areas with "immediate applicability" is quite in fashion in some circles. (The same circles, coincidentally, that do not usually do something for the benefit of mankind. Corporates come to mind.)

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps now we can build that Q-bomb...

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah corporations sure don't do anything useful for mankind, btw you mind if I take your computer? It was made by a corporation and is completely useless...

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Experience has shown that "pure" research often leads to applications the researchers never imagined.

And what have you done with General Relativity lately?

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Used an accurately calibrated GPS unit to find my lost puppy.

That was easy. Next!

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[haxor.dk]

If you want to know what uses pure research can lead to...

Play Alpha Centauri, and find out! =)

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[Tim C]

...and almost every component in it is based on the results of pure, academic research that was performed with no immediate apparent application.

The laser, for example, was a curiosity sat around in research labs for a decade or more before anyone thought of anything to do with it.

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[hesiod]

> Used an accurately calibrated GPS unit to find my lost puppy.

Your puppy has GPS? Sweet. Is it on his collar, or did the aliens emplant it into his little puppy brain (like they did with me, *TWITCH TWITCH*)?

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[hesiod]

s/emplant/implant/ ...whatever... Don't know how I did that

Also reported in Physics News Update 642

[prestidigital]

I don't know what half this stuff means. But I think it's cool that someone else does.

Here's the body of the email update:

INTRIGUING ODDITIES IN HIGH-ENERGY NUCLEAR COLLISIONS. Missing
debris in the smashup between gold nuclei going at close to the
speed of light suggests the creation of a highly unusual plasma
environment, researchers have announced at Brookhaven National
Laboratory. By smashing together gold ions at Brookhaven's
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), scientists are attempting to
make and study a state of matter that existed only millionths of a
second after the big bang. Called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), it is
a hot, dense soup of individual quarks and gluons. In today's
universe, by contrast, quarks come in groups of twos and threes,
held together by gluons. This spring, Brookhaven researchers
performed a "control" experiment, in which they collided a gold
nucleus with a deuteron, a light nucleus consisting of just a proton
and neutron. In these and other kinds of nuclear collisions, a pair
of quarks from a proton or neutron occasionally gets ejected. In
turn each ejected quark produces a stream or "jet" of particles in
its wake. In some of the gold-deuteron collisions, the researchers
indeed observed pairs of jets flying in opposite directions. But in
head-to-head collisions between two gold nuclei, researchers
observed only one, rather than two, jets. This property, called jet
quenching, suggests that the particle jet traveling in the direction
of the collision region is getting absorbed by a hot, dense state of
matter. Jet quenching is predicted to occur in the correspondingly
hot, dense environment of a quark-gluon plasma, but RHIC
experimentalists are not ready to claim the QGP prize quite yet. To
verify its presence and rule out rival scenarios, they are planning
numerous other experiments for finding other signatures of a QGP.
However, the new data has convinced Columbia theorist Miklos
Gyulassy that the RHIC team is already seeing a QGP (see
http://www-cunuke.phys.columbia.edu/people/g yulass y/Welcome.html).
The gold-gold collisions, he and his colleagues calculate, produce
an environment 100 times denser than ordinary nuclear matter and
display properties predicted in QGP models based on quantum
chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong force which holds
nuclei together. On June 18, three of the four RHIC experimental
groups have submitted papers on the new results to Physical Review
Letters and researchers discussed these new results at a special
Brookhaven colloquium today. (Brookhaven press release, June 11,
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr 06110 3.htm.)

Units?

[wcspxyx]

From the article:

The top, purple band is the realm where QGP can exist, at very high temperatures above 1,000,000,000,000 degrees.

Is that in Celsius or Fahrenheit?

Re:Units?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kelvin.

Re:Units?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rankine.

Re:Units?

[Abcd1234]

Given they're physicists, methinks it's in Kelvins.

Re:Units?

[Anonymous Coward]

It could just as easily be Celcius. At those temps, they're pretty much the same.

Re:Units?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope it's Kelvin. Kelvin just seems cooler.

Re:Units?

[Abcd1234]

Very true... especially given that their "1,000,..." value likely includes a margin of error which easily exceeds 273K. :)

Re:Units?

[red floyd]

"Top Purple Band" would be a good name for a rock band.
</DAVE-BARRY>

Re:Units?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't be Kelvins because with Kelvin, it's not measured in degrees. It's not "500 degrees Kelvin" it's just "500 Kelvin."

Re:Units?

[Josh Booth]

That's neither. It's Kelvin, which uses the same difference in temperature as Celsius but has zero set to absolute zero, where there is so little energy that particles stop moving, or a Bose-Einsten Condensate forms where particulate matter turns into a wave. So, 273.15 Kelvin (note that there is no degrees before Kelvin) is the same as 0 degrees Celsius, and 300 Kelvin is 26.85 degrees Celsius, which is also (9/5)*(26.85 degrees Celsius) + 32 = 80.33 degrees Fahrenheit. However, since we are scientists, the temperature listed in the article may as well be in Celsius because 10e12 Kelvin is about the same as 10e12 + 273.15 degrees Celsius, due to Sig Figs (a commonly used method for rounding numbers within experimental accuracy). Either way, physicists would probably never use Celsius or Fahrenheit because things like thermodynamics (ThermoGodDamnIts!) can't be calculated in Celsius. They need a real baseline, not one based on water, that, while useful for bileogical work, is not for even chemistry. Wow, I knew I learned something in AP Chemistry this year!

Re:Units?

[Izago909]

Does it matter? Kelvin, Celsius, Farenheit... no matter what its so hot I wouldn't want to touch it. Thats all that matters to me.

Re:Units?

[Abcd1234]

Oh, I'm aware of this, but you must realize that MANY publications make that mistake. In fact, there are plenty of scientists who use the phrase "degrees Kelvin", despite it being technically incorrect.

Incidentally, your example should probably actually be "500 Kelvins", much like how we refer to Joules, Ohms, Volts, etc.

Re:Units?

[Anonymous Coward]

you can't 'touch' it - it's too small. think 2 Au atoms as the bigger size (Au + D was the other case)

Weapons?

[handy_vandal]

...what are the practicle applications for this research? How will it benifit mankind?

More to the point -- what are the military applications?

you may have to wait for the LHC in 2007

[zptdooda]

âThe scientists are not yet ready to claim the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma, however. That must await corroborating experiments, now under way at RHICâ

The Large Hadron Collider will hopefully be powerful enough to extend the Standard Model and get direct evidence of the Higgs boson as well.

1100 dual-CPU nodes...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I've just discovered the root cause for global warming...

Re:1100 dual-CPU nodes...

[Villageidiot9390]

Only if they are AMD Processors...

Parent is a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

...Scientists can use these jets to probe your anus...

These article posting trolls seem to be gaining in popularity lately... Maybe because the mods don't take the time to read them fully before modding them up.

Weapons

[UnixChild00]

Remember those "experminental" weapons that they used in Half-Life like the gluon gun and the tau cannon?

One Step Closer..

[YomikoReadman]

.. To figuring out what really happened at the start of the Universe, and from that, where the Universe is headed. This is some good stuff IMO, because by looking to the past, we can truly predict the future.

Re:One Step Closer..

[corbettw]

"...because by looking to the past, we can truly predict the future."

Only if we fail to learn from it.

Re:One Step Closer..

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we are talking quantum physics...I think Hiesenberg might have something to say about this.

Re:slashdotted already....

[Auckerman]

For those who asked earlier about what use this research has, the parent troll seems to know...

"Scientists can use these jets to probe your anus"

Coolest name for matter ever!

[foo fighter]

I'm going to name my band "Quark-Gluon Plasma". All my fans will call it "QGP" for short. It's much cooler than "Bose-Einstein Condensate".

On a slightly more serious note...

The article links to a helpful physics primer if you, like me, need a little help understanding subatomic physics. (I'm just have a lowly Math degree.)

A little googling turned up this awesome page on subatomic particles called The Particle Adventure. This is the most accessible physics lesson I've ever received. Awesome.

This is the most fun I've ever had with subatomic physics: Quark Dance!

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[TimeZone]

The article links to a helpful physics primer if you, like me, need a little help understanding subatomic physics. (I'm just have a lowly Math degree.) A little googling turned up this awesome page on subatomic particles called The Particle Adventure. This is the most accessible physics lesson I've ever received. Awesome. This is the most fun I've ever had with subatomic physics: Quark Dance!

If you want a fun primer on semiconductor physics, you should check out the Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics.

TimeZone

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[Anonymous Coward]

band name - "The Lennard Jones Potential"
porn name - "Law of Mass Action"

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[SteveAstro]

I'm going to name my band "Quark-Gluon Plasma". All my fans will call it "QGP" for short. It's much cooler than "Bose-Einstein Condensate".

No, the whole point is QGP is much much HOTTER than a BEC.....

So you won't be a cool band, you'll be a hot band.

Steve

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[Josh Booth]

If you really want to read a funny book on physics, I recomend The God Particle by Leon Lederman. It is written by an experimentational physicist, not a theoretical physicist, and is the greatest book on physics. It goes through an entire history of physics, from Democritus of Abdera from ancient Greece, who first hypothecized that everything was made of a-toms (Lederman's spelling for really uncuttable things, not chemical atoms), to modern day (~1993) with the Fermilab particle accelerator. Everything is explained very incrementally and very well, but if you don't get it, Lederman inserts so much humor that it is extremely enjoyable to read.

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[waveclaw]

Stephen Baxer in his short-story collection Vacuum Diagrams called this Quark-Gluon plasma "Quagma" (a play on Quark-magma.) This mystical substance was the source of human's sublight starship power and propulsion (the GUT ships) as well as a potent weapon against the enemy of all baryonic matter, the dark-matter photino birds.

Once again, someone in Hard Science Fiction presieges those working in Hard Science.

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[datawar]

One the systems on my home LAN is 'quark' and another other is 'gluon'... My [main] laptop is 'neutrino', though, so there needs to be some sort of 'quark-gluon neutrino-augmented plasma' to make me totally cool :-)

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[Loki_1929]

"(I'm just have a lowly Math degree.)"

Still working on the English degree, hmm? :)

Re:Coolest name for matter ever!

[shrikel]

I'm going to name my band "Quark-Gluon Plasma" ... It's much cooler than "Bose-Einstein Condensate"

?!?!?

Let's see, .000 000 003 degrees Kelvin for the Bose-Einstein Condensate vs. "more than 300 million times the surface temperature of the sun" (From the article) for this stuff.

I think you've got "much cooler" and "MUCH HOTTER" mixed up.

We Have Reached the Limits...

[Anonymous Coward]

...of what rectal probing can teach us.

Actually...

[blamanj]

The results are a new milestone in the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, a new state of nuclear matter.

...it's a 13.7 billion year old state of matter.

Call me crazy, but...

[codezion]

I always imagined what a beowolf cluster would be capable of. Now I know!

-- CodeZion

Don't determine the mass of the the Higgs Boson!

[Mouth of Sauron]

We're all gonna die!

(ob. Lexx reference)

Re:Can't say that I'm too impressed

[Tiny Elvis]

Can a moral precept be seen, heard or touched? For that matter can a perfect and loving God be seen heard or touched? Has said entity ever given us any tangible evidence he exists besides a collection of ambiguous, internally inconsistent, and scientifically inaccurate writings of primitive nomads who thought sacrificing animals (or their son on an altar) would please Him?
Does this loving God love to see a universe full of suffering?

bosons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Scandalous.

Re:Can't say that I'm too impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

OOH, NICE TROLL!
Lameness Filter Encountered in Parent Post!
Reason: Dont act so High and Mighty, cum guzzling bitch!

It's nice to see that they made another milestone

[Krapangor]

but they will never reach their goal.
The theory behind quark gluon plasma has one serious flaw: it ignores the effects resulting from the existence of gravitions. Due to the weakness and long range of gravitation we hvae that the wave functions of gravitions are spread over extremely large areas. That's why it's so hard to prove their existence.
However, they have effects on the quark-gluon plasma. Their wave function couples the state of the plasma with the observer. Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter. Note that this can't happen with the Bose-Einstein condensate, because this effect takes place on a more macroscopic level, gravitons are too weak to have any effects here.
Funnily enough you could use the quark-gluon plasma to create energy, even though it doesn't really exist. With such a plasma you can create rapid (really rapid like nanoseconds) proton decay. So you could use this basically as some advanced particle bomb (effects similar to a neutron bomb).
I wonder if this is the reason why some HEP are sponsored the DARPA.

BNL's Mailbox Tomorrow:

[IonSwitz]

"Your results appear to have been obtained using proprietary technology within the so-called Linux Unix operating system. Please cease and desist using SCO's Intellectual Property without obtaining a licence. All your Quark-Gluon Plasma are belong to us."

Well, as the saying goes

[Anonymous Coward]

The god is in the plasma.

Oh My Good God That Is so Disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

What sickness does indeed exist in this world LOL

Prior art?

[foo fighter]

"When two gold nuclei collide head-on, the temperatures reached are so extreme (more than 300 million times the surface temperature of the sun) that the individual protons and neutrons inside the merged gold nuclei are expected to melt...

Doesn't AMD hold a patent on this?

Re:Prior art?

[prestidigital]

Now see, I get this - any day my new P4 is going to show up and I can finally get rid of my Athlon 770. When I bought it, I thought it was 770MHz, but I think 770 is the temp it runs at!

What is cork-elmers plasma good for

[A55M0NKEY]

What will making quark gluon plasma tell us? Will we be able to make chickens without feathers or something?

Re:What is cork-elmers plasma good for

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but it helps us make chickens that smash into each other at high speed and due to the instantaneous achievement of 1,000,000,000 kelvin spontaneously cook themselves.

Here's what Einstein would have said:

[reinard]

""If I knew what it was I was doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?""
-Albert Einstein

Basic Introduction

[HughJampton]

Here's a decent Nature article on QGP http://www.nature.com/nsu/000217/000217-5.html

Those damn humans!

[mikeophile]

This is from a report Brookhaven made to define the possible dangers of the RHIC. Oddly, the site seems to be down now. Black holes and stable negatively charged strangelets, while cool ways to snuff the world, don't hold a candle to this one. the report

This is an exotic possibility of which the report states that "Physicists have grown quite accustomed to the idea that empty space  what we ordinarily call 'vacuum'  is in reality a highly structured medium, that can exist in various states or phases, roughly analogous to the liquid or solid phases of water. . . . Although certainly nothing in our existing knowledge of the laws of Nature demands it, several physicists have speculated on the possibility that our contemporary 'vacuum' is only metastable, and that a sufficiently violent disturbance might trigger its decay into something quite different. A transition of this kind would propagate outward from its source throughout the universe at the speed of light, and would be catastrophic."

Re:Those damn humans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this just another way of describing the Big Bang?

Re:Those damn humans!

[istewart]

Wow... sounds like the Genesis Effect from Star Trek II.

Re:Those damn humans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really much of a worry... far, far more energetic events than humans will ever be able to create occur all the time out there in space, in cosmic-ray collisions. If it were going to happen, it would have already.

Re:Those damn humans!

[confused one]

You know, the reason the link was dead was because this was FUD generated by a few physicist claiming that RHIC could lead to the end of the world....

It was discredited with the simple truthful statement that a neutrino interacting with matter in the Earth could potentially release more energy than RHIC could generate in it's lifetime. i.e. higher energy reactions than those generated at RHIC occur all the time, all around us; and, we're still here.

of course, I'm paraphrasing a little...

Re:Those damn humans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ether!!!

Re:Those damn humans!

[73939133]

It was discredited with the simple truthful statement that a neutrino interacting with matter in the Earth could potentially release more energy than RHIC could generate in it's lifetime.

No, they were almost certainly not talking about "neutrinos" but about very high energy particles hitting earth.

i.e. higher energy reactions than those generated at RHIC occur all the time, all around us; and, we're still here.

That has been suggested, but it's not clear that it's true. The situation of two particles colliding head-on in an accelerator is not at all the same as cosmic particles interacting with the earth.

Still I wouldn't worry too much about a meta-stable vacuum--I think you are more likely to get killed during your morning commute. And I'm sure that if it is metastable and we cause it to phase-change, the effect will at least be quick and painless. But we really may be embarking into new territory here.

Re:Those damn humans!

[beamdriver]

Hmmm, sounds a lot like Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan

Re:Those damn humans!

[dmiller]

Someone has been reading too much Kurt Vonnegut.

Re:Those damn humans!

[confused one]

No, they were almost certainly not talking about "neutrinos" but about very high energy particles hitting earth.

Actually, they were using neutrinos in one example I read. They weren't the only particle of interest though; as they were also discussing gamma and energetic protons.

That has been suggested, but it's not clear that it's true.

Actually, it is. Having worked at a particle accelerator (not RHIC) I can tell you that you can see interactions all the time. We used to do testing of our detectors using cosmic background radiation. The vast majority or of lower energy levels than RHIC; however, some are significant

The situation of two particles colliding head-on in an accelerator is not at all the same as cosmic particles interacting with the earth.

This is true. Generally we optimize things to look for something specific. We also have some limitations -- such as: in order to reach these energy levels we have to accelerate large nuclei. Nature has mechanisms to accelerate smaller particles to much higher energies than we can currently achieve, being lowly humans with Earth bound resources.

Re:It's nice to see that they made another milesto

[Abcd1234]

Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter

Umm, the fact that you can't directly observe the existence of the plasma doesn't mean you can't detect its presence (or, to be more precise, that fact that it *was* present). After all, we can't directly observe black holes. The article itself describes how they might infer the existence of the plasma... a difference in the ratios of large hadrons after the collision, compared to lower-energy events, as a result of the plasma condensing back into normal matter (I hope I got that right :). Granted, this isn't nearly as nice as being able to directly observe the phenomenon, but it's certainly something, since we can at least confirm another prediction(s) of the Standard Model.

Mod parent up, and parent's parent back down to -1

[Anonymous Coward]

And learn to spell, while you're at it?

Imagine a...

[karlandtanya]

nevermind.

The obvious will happen.

[pixelgeek]

-- The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL

Which makes one wonder how long it is before we see Microsoft announce Windows XP Nuclear Collider Edition

Re:The obvious will happen.

[confused one]

Any attemp by Microsoft to cluster this many processors must end in a collision...

Re:The obvious will happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

They had one for normal collision detection and analysis. It didn't work too well though.

(Hint... CE? ;-))

RHIC...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, am I the only one who clicked on RHIC and expected Red Hat Instutional Center?

Science geared towards warfare

[[cx]]

The money comes from defence contractors looking for new cool ways to kill, maim, or destroy. Hopefully we get more positive scientific advancements rather than a destructive force witnessed for a millionth of a second during an event that only theoretically happened.

I am hoping for a planetary atmosphere renewer :)

But hey I think I just play too much MOO2.

[cx]
mod it up, ill fill your cup

Re:Science geared towards warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

I am hoping for a planetary atmosphere renewer :)

yeah, throw in a core waste dump, too ;-)

Re:Science geared towards warfare

[confused one]

Check your history. The military and the government in general have always funded most basic science research. As a result we have an understanding of the electron -- without which you wouldn't have a computer. The internet was originally a government link between computer resources the government thought were important. The NIH sees to it that basic biological (medical) research is carried out.

You owe a lot to that which you are trying to discredit

Re:Science geared towards warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

So untrue, it's scary.

Most _basic_ science discoveries of the past 200 years were by individual scientists, working in isolation or very small groups. The only way you can really squeeze government in, is if you think of institutes at least partially tax-funded. Think Watt, Edison, Einstein & Dirac.

As for the military, they always cream off the basic science, and put it to "practical" applications.

Scientists can use these jets to probe your anus.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you are saying is the purpose of gold-gold collisions in my anus produce jets in order to evaluate my prostate?

All that glimmers is not gold, but a gold fountain from my anus is good news. Bad news is if that fountain is of coal slag. That would mean you have an unhappy anus!

Not really

[f97tosc]

Because it is only a few atoms that have this high temperature. 10 atoms that are 10^12 degrees hotter than the environment can heat up the 10^13 surrounding atoms by one degree. That is, it is enough energy to heat up one nanogram of material one degree. I would not sleep over it.

This is of course a very rough calculation, but the point is that we are not so much dealing with enormous energies as with moderate energies concentrated to extremely small matter. They are not going to blow something big up.

Tor

Re:Not really

[menscher]

They are not going to blow something big up.

I take it the universe isn't "big", by your definition?

There was some mild concern in the scientific community before RHIC turned on that it might destroy the universe. As I recall, the idea was that the entire universe might be at an unstable equillibrium, and that this experiment could cause a transition to a lower ground state. In so doing, it catastrophically change the entire universe (which would really piss of those aliens, I'm sure).

The counterargument was that these energies have probably occurred somewhere else, so if that were a concern, it would already have happened (the aliens would have tried this experiment, for example).

In the end, it was decided that we might as well go ahead with it. We were pretty sure it was safe, and if we were wrong, there wouldn't be anyone left to complain anyway!

Re:Not really

[datan]

shouldn't they have applied for a permit at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri? kinda like how you need a permit from the city to demolish buildings or set off fireworks.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know where you heard these "concerns", but your description is roughly on par with the typical technobabble you find in an episode of Star Trek. That is to say you use actual terms but combine them in a way that is meaningless to anyone who knows anything about the subject matter.

Re:Not really

[zackbar]

But it would have been really interesting if the concentration of such heat at such a small level might have had an affect on matter itself. Perhaps discover some kind of "subspace".

Of course, since it's been proved that there is no ether, the chance of it is less likely.

Re:Not really

[menscher]

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

Here's a summary of the discussions about these concerns. The article mentions three primary concerns:

• Formation of Mini Black Holes
• Strangelets and Strange Matter
• Vacuum instabilities

My post only mentioned the third, since I consider that to be the most interesting/plausible. (Small black holes actually evaporate via Hawking radiation, so I never really worried about them. And strangelets just seemed too silly altogether, especially since a strange quark decays weakly to an up quark, an electron, and an anti-neutrino.)

Anyway, you'll probably claim I'm just spouting more "technobabble", so read the article (and its references in Scientific American for yourself.

Or you could just take my word for it. I am, after all, completing a degree in particle physics. ;)

1 significant digit - unit does not matter

[f97tosc]

Since they only give one significant digit it does not matter, as

10^12 C ~= 10^12 K ~= 10^12 F

The differ by less than a factor 2, which is insignificant when you only have accuracy to a factor of 10.

(On the other hand, it is from physics so it is probably Kelvin).

Tor

Re:Can't say that I'm too impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Eep ... u sound depressed. Cheer up mate!

Ponder the story of ol' Job. No, not Steve Jobs story on how he lost most of his money after Apple in NEXT and then became a billionaire off of poor Mr. Speilberg's divorce (i.e. Pixar).

No matter how bad things get, I believe they are happening for the best - in the long-term sense. That's the tale of Job. Not stop being sad and do to the gym to check out the eye candy God created for you!

Quark

[eclectic4]

...will this new "gluon plasma" be in version 7 then? And how long are we going to have to wait for it THIS time...?

Coverage on Ch. 12, Long Island's News Station

[StefanJ]

Interdimensional Gateway Opens in Suffolk County.

Elder Gods awake from aeons of slumber.

Film at Eleven.

Broken link - here's a working one

[Anonymous Coward]

Your link to the report appears broken (404). I found a link to the pdf version of the report here.

Re:Don't determine the mass of the the Higgs Boson

[Josh Booth]

I don't think the Higgs boson has mass, becuase it is what gives things mass. Photons don't have charge, do they? I suppose I just don't get the reference.

Re:Can't say that I'm too impressed

[Izago909]

When's the last time someone talked of a god propelled spacecraft? I think thatâ(TM)s Mr. 500 club when he gets on his racist and fascist burn-em-at-the-stake bandwagon. Assume there is conflict (A) in the world. You have religion (B) and Science (C). What results in a simpler answer A+B or A+C? Science has solved more problems than religion can ever hope to. In short, religion is simply another of mans political institutions that preys upon his spirituality in order to enslave the minds of the masses. Fear the future and pray for the good `ol days. Yea, the good old days, never mind that it was only good to white Christian males who had a boy in the cotton fields and a woman under foot. Religion: Continuing to prove that man would rather have any âoeanswerâ other than âoewe donâ(TM)t yet knowâ

Re:It's nice to see that they made another milesto

[Anonymous Coward]

The theory behind quark gluon plasma has one serious flaw: it ignores the effects resulting from the existence of gravitions. Due to the weakness and long range of gravitation we hvae that the wave functions of gravitions are spread over extremely large areas. That's why it's so hard to prove their existence. However, they have effects on the quark-gluon plasma. Their wave function couples the state of the plasma with the observer. Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter.

yet another random mixing of scientific terms trying to pose as knowledgeable opinion.

1. the 'spread over extremely large areas' statement is nonsense. nothing about weak and long-range implies long wavelength. actually, the 'coupling' would be done through virtual (read - off mass shell) particles anyway so there's no energy restriction other than overall conservation - you get loop small corrections with all energies.

2. 'collapses instandly'(sic)?!? as in 'it suddenly couples'? looks like you're saying 'i can't suddenly observe qg plasma 'cause i didn't see what generated it'. either you have no idea what you're takling about or you really think qg plasma comes out of nowhere (same thing). besides, even if you did suddenly 'couple' (read interact) with it out of nowhere, you'd collapse it to what? normally adding up an interaction might break down some symmetry of the system and make it end up in a different ground state, but there's no reasonable base to say it won't still be a qg plasma. in other words, you're saying that if i ever get to see you (i.e. 'couple' to you via photons) you'll be instantly collapsed to ... what?

... and i won't even start about the last paragraph ... you really have no idea what you're talking about

To help answer The Question!

[RatBastard]

What single thing that makes mankind unique is that we ask questions. We wonder why things are the way they are. We want to know what came before us and what will follow after us. We want to know, well, EVERYTHING!

Why does any answer have to have a practical application? Stop trying to make everything around you serve your will. Take some time to enjoy and examine the magisty, the wonder, the terrible beauty that is the universe we live in.

So how many states of matter are there now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gas, solid, liquid, plasma, Bose-Einstein condensate, ???

Uhhh..... Not knowledge

[follower_of_christ]

A huge chunk of you, perhaps all of you, was inside a star at one time.

You speak as if it's fact when actually it's a theory. I guess I don't know how God created the Universe down to the molecule.

Just about all of evolutionary biology theories are linked to the human race being some sort of goo way back when and via some sort of radical chemical change we became what we are today.

........ Ok.. There are several thousands of essential amino acids or protein chains that compromise the human body's essential structure. (For instance, there are cells that rely on an entire set of aminos to exist for the cell to live, if any one of those aminos are missing it means life can't occur) We have never successfully created enough aminos to build the very basic building blocks by "sparking" them in any petree dish. We can't create these things today which opens a gaping whole in claming evolutionary biology is fact.

Of course, my Slashdot user ID is follower_of_christ, so what am I going to obviously post?
I'm merely going to pose the question this way. If part of us was absolutely part of some star at some point, then you presume absolute truth exists (Or maybe you really meant, "maybe we were part of some star").
We use certain laws like infinity that rely on absolute truth to make the same presumption as you made about us being a part of a star. If we multiply 1.0e-(google) chance that life could evolve in such a manor by infinity, the answer is infinity. Well, in that case if there is a 1.0e-(google) to the (google)th power percent that God exists, then using the same equation you get the same result. Or again, maybe mathematical truth is relative to the person calculating it....

Now, that knowledge will never make me any money.

What you have sir is not knowledge; it's merely unproven evolutionary biology theory. I'll tell ya one thing though. All of us being parts of various stars billions of years ago and colliding into one another and forming the Slashdot community sounds as crazy to some as religion might sound to another. It's most likely because religion is not taught in public school where these theories are sold as absolute truth (which is where also, they are told absolute truth doesn't exist).

Ok... I'll go back to my church now..

Re:Uhhh..... Not knowledge

[Eevee]

Of course, my Slashdot user ID is follower_of_christ, so what am I going to obviously post?

For a brief moment, I had the hope you might post something like:

As a follower of Christ, I realize I should be humble. I understand that the Bible is not a chemistry textbook, nor a biology textbook. I realize if all truths were in the Bible, no human would be able to read such a massive volume â" and more importantly, that the truths God wanted us to understand would be lost. I also realize that trying to make the Bible into the ultimate textbook is both a waste of time and a slight to God. There is no formula in the bible for penicillin, for Godâ(TM)s purpose was not to create chemistry majors â" we can do that on our own â" but rather to instruct and enlighten us about the important things, the things we call religion.

But then you posted the usual stupid crap.

Re:Uhhh..... Not knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Another idea is that God used materials already in place in the Universe to form the Earth. As you and I both know, the Bible mentions God created the Earth, but it doesn't specifically say how.

Re:Uhhh..... Not knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

If we multiply 1.0e-(google) chance that life could evolve in such a manor by infinity, the answer is infinity. Well, in that case if there is a 1.0e-(google) to the (google)th power percent that God exists, then using the same equation you get the same result. Or again, maybe mathematical truth is relative to the person calculating it....

Your reasoning is flawed. It only makes sense for rate-based processes. As in: the probability of some thing happening in some time t is some small, but finite, number, but the probability of that thing happening goes to unity as time goes to infinity.

So, I don't think you meant to argue that the existence of God is due to a process which occurs at some rate (which is what you did). That would mean God is made at some rate by a random process, like a human being is made at some rate by a random process. I think it's an interesting and novel concept, but I doubt you agree.

What you likely meant to say is that you think there is some probability of God existing. However, that probability doesn't become more likely over time (even infinite time), as it's not a rate. It always the same.

And furthermore, there's nothing to suggest the probability is larger than zero, unlike evolution, which everyone, even creationists, conceed has a probability higher than zero as it is a physical possibility. And as you conveniently pointed out, given enough time, it'll happen. But God's existence still has the same probability, so it seems to me that you've ended up making a decent argument that evolution is more likely... Oops. I love when creationists try to use science against science. It's so cute. Now tell us how evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics! Pretty please?

Totally wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

All elements of mass greater than Iron are either a) Big Bang remmnants, b) created by mad scientists with nuclear acclearators. Fusion in stars stops at Iron.

History of nucleosynthesis

[Bootsy Collins]

All elements of mass greater than Iron are either a) Big Bang remmnants, b) created by mad scientists with nuclear acclearators. Fusion in stars stops at Iron.

No. You're correct that, because of the curve of nuclear binding energy, you can't produce anything more massive than iron through fusion. But that doesn't mean heavier elements than iron come from the Big Bang. In fact, atoms heavier than carbon cannot be produced through Big Bang nucleosynthesis; H through C is all that's around when the first generation of stars form. Elements heavier than iron are produced in high-energy nuclear reactions that occur during supernovae. This is standard contemporary astrophysics, from any current textbook.

For an overview of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, see e.g. The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, or Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Pitched at a lower level, try Joe Silk's The Big Bang . For more general descriptions of nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, see e.g. Harwit's Astrophysical Concepts or Bowers and Deeming's Astrophysics, Vol. I: Stars .

Re:History of nucleosynthesis

[vondo]

Almost. The heavier elements ARE produced via fusion, but it's fusion that consumes, rather than produces, energy. It happens in supernovae.

The remnants from the Big Bang are only hydrogen, helium, and maybe a little lithium (I'm not sure about that).

Re:History of nucleosynthesis

[Bootsy Collins]

The remnants from the Big Bang are only hydrogen, helium, and maybe a little lithium (I'm not sure about that).

You synthesize nuclei up to carbon in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, but the mass fractions produced above helium are *very* small. The hydrogen mass fraction is about 0.76, the helium mass fraction is about 0.24, and the lithium mass fraction is about 1e-6. Beryllium, boron, and carbon are significantly less than that.

But despite the low abundances above helium, observers do go hunting for these relic abundances (of lithium, anyway); see e.g. papers by Doug Duncan's group at the University of Chicago on lithium abundances in old halo stars.

Re:History of nucleosynthesis

[NulDevice]

Just wanna second the recommendation for the Kolb book (or any of his books. "Blind Watchers of the Sky" is good too). Rocky Kolb has a great way of explaining things so that it's interesting for everyone.

Requisite SCO Bashing Humor Post

[Nom du Keyboard]

The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters

SCO adds the entire branch of physics to their lawsuit maintaining that all discoveries made with Linux software belong to them.

Their suit against God for creating a world where Linux IP was infringed is on hold while they attempt to hire Dilbert as their process server.

Re:Can't say that I'm too impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take bets on which is proven first.

Re:How about we simply mod YOU down INSTEAD?

[orthogonal]

Mom made you take a break from your Xbox, clean out the basement, and take a shower, and now you're all pouty, huh?

It isn't the action, it's the knowledge

[forii]

Yes but lasers don't require megawatthours of electricity to generate. This sort of thing absolutely requires super high energies...

Therefore there will probably never be a commercial application to quark gluon plasma generation.

It often isn't the actual scientific experiment that is important, it's the knowledge that is gained through that experiment. For example, and this is slightly related to this experiment, in the 30s Stern and Gerlach sent a beam of hydrogen atoms through an inhomogeneous magnetic field and detected the nuclear magnetic moment. Later on Rabi sent a beam of LiCl molecules through oscillating magnetic fields to test if there was a magnetic resonance effect happening at a certain frequency.

Now neither of these experiments are used in applications today, but what they did do is establish the foundations of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, which today is used every day in MRI machines around the world. And while none of which use high energy beams in their operation, they wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the use of "non-applicable" experiments.

Come on you guys!

[slowtonejoe75]

Without revealing any names, I will say that I am the son of the guy who was the project manager for Phenix. Phenix is one of the two big detectors at RHIC. I hear about the research going there on an almost daily basis.

I must say that the nature of ~ 80% of the posts here is completely misinformed crap! What I mean to say is that I am truly scared when I read the comments and know that Slashdot is supposed to be a haven for nerds and geeks. There are so many bogus things said in comments moderated above 1 that I can't address them all.

Good luck to you all...

P.S. Is it time for the real geeks and nerds here to abandon ship?

Re:Come on you guys!

[confused one]

No! You just need to wade through the comments made by the geek wannabes.

Think of it as humor... Sometimes all you can do is laugh...

Be a teacher: respond and inform. Maybe, just maybe a few will read the replies and learn something.

Re:Come on you guys!

[delong]

I must say that the nature of ~ 80% of the posts here is completely misinformed crap!

Hey! You're new here aren't you? If not, you must have been reading the linked articles (silly thing, you) and not reading the comments. Or you're just a blinking unobservant idiot, but I doubt that. Of COURSE 80% (to be exceedingly generous) of the posts here are complete and utter crap. Slashdot is the dumbass magnet of the Internet.

Derek

Re:Come on you guys!

[Tim C]

I must say that the nature of ~ 80% of the posts here is completely misinformed crap!

You're being rather generous there.

I have a degree in Physics, and the amount of utter tripe regurgitated here whenever there's a science-related article is astounding and frankly upsetting. I'm not just talking about people getting subtle matters of cutting-edge stuff wrong - I mean fundamental misconceptions on the sort of stuff I learnt at school, let alone college or university.

Mind you, the same happens with programming-related stories. I've been a professional programmer for a little over four years, and was an amateur for a lot longer before that. The signal to noise ratio is much better than in science stories, but some of the misconceptions are still shocking.

It's got to the point that I barely do much more than skim the front page most days. A shame, really, as I've been here for quite a while, as my uid should tell you.

Re:Come on you guys!

[slowtonejoe75]

This is fscked up that the replies to my parent comment which essential support my claims get rated 2 & 4, Interesting... And my parent is a 0, Troll. The mod system must be... temporarily malfunctioning. ;)

slowness

Band title..

[efuseekay]

hehehe, we physics students have a nice time thinking about band names from physics jargon. OUr favourite is still "The Naked Singularity."

Btw, the naked singularity is a concept from general relativity : it is the point in spacetime where Einstein's equation blows up and makes no sense. All blackholes, mathematically, have singularities in the middle, but they are "hidden" behind the event horizon, so a guy who fall into the blackhole may see the singularity, but will never get out to tell his friends outside the black hole. A naked singularity is one that is not "hidden" by an event horizion.

There is a conjecture, called Cosmic Censorship that says that naked singularities do not exist in nature. It is not proven. ALso, Cosmic Censorship is a great name for a band too :)

Anomalous reactions...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope they have Gordon Freeman on staff in case the shit hits the fan.

SCO claims

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been away a while... is this the latest addition to the trolling handbook?

Re:SCO claims

[Anonymous Coward]

YES! And don't mention the handbook in front of these unwashed "registered people!"

you read it here first

[Anonymous Coward]

or you could have done on New Scientist a week ago - and they give you the straight dope

Not exactly

[MickLinux]

To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star.

I don't have a lot other than my (very faulty) memory to back this up, but I seem to remember a Scientific American article that most of our heavy elements were formed in the shock waves of supernovas of the first round of stars. Not only that, but the progress of the supernova shock wave creates large clumps of specific types of elements.

But most of us was not inside a star at one type, hydrogen possibly excepted. Most of us was most likely formed in a shock wave.

But your point still stands: you feel immensely richer for thinking you know what you do. [Sorry for that small withdrawal from your bank account, but the interest that will accrue from your *knew* imagined knowledge will accrue at a much faster rate.]

All joking aside, we don't *know* anything, but we have our theories, and those theories do help us feel at home within our universe [much like my fish in his tank feels very uneasy when I drop a ping pong ball in the water, but later feels at home with it], and that makes us more comfortable.

Re:Not exactly

[Bootsy Collins]

I don't have a lot other than my (very faulty) memory to back this up, but I seem to remember a Scientific American article that most of our heavy elements were formed in the shock waves of supernovas of the first round of stars.

But most of us was not inside a star at one type, hydrogen possibly excepted. Most of us was most likely formed in a shock wave.

The references I gave earlier in this discussion are good sources for more on this. You're correct that I was careless in my wording in the initial post, in that inside the star (through standard stellar thermonuclear processes), you can't get any higher than iron; stuff more massive than iron gets produced through supernovae. But I don't believe the incident nuclei in such reactions are merely in the vicinity of the SN; the incident nuclei are part of the SN itself, and the reactions in question take place in or nearby. (I really wish I had my copies of Bethe's reviews around) So the stuff heavier than iron is still processed through stars; just at the very end of the life cycle for those stars that SN.

Not only that, but the progress of the supernova shock wave creates large clumps of specific types of elements.

I'm not sure what this means, so I dunno. It's certainly true that different types of SN (carbon deflagration on a white dwarf surface vs. the classic scenario of collapse of a massive star) have different heavy element production ratios (the second type producing more r-process elements like oxygen and neon and so forth). I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to, though.

Re:obligitory joke....

[tgrigsby]

I hear SCO is suing. They're arguing that some of the gluons in a disk holding an AIX distro are exactly like those also found in a disk holding SCO Unix. They've multiplied the damages times the number of gluons in the disk, and they're filing documents with the court showing drawings of what SCO's attorneys say are actual gluons found in the compared disks.

Okay, you're going out on a limb...

[MickLinux]

If your limb is correct, then they won't ever get it.

I would argue that gravitons exist specifically as a quark-gluon plasma. In other words, gravitons are relativistic individual quarks. [which would unify two forces to the gravo-strong force.]

Test: If *my* prediction is correct, they should be able to detect a gravitational spike when they collide these gold ions things together.

Reasoning: Gravity can be explained as a warping of the space structure. If you think about what the space structure for light particles is, you will conclude that it is the atoms: that is, that the light experiences its time only during the interactions with other particles, which is largely electron shells. Extending that reasoning to massed particles, we might surmise that massed particles' spatial structure is similarly defined by its interactions with other particles.

But after looking at the structure of atoms, nucleii, and such, one must conclude that any such energetic particles must be extremely massive, and extremely short-lived.

Such a structure could be formed by a quark-gluon plasma, especially where you have the three colors interacting with each other while moving in perpendicular directions. You would then result in a huge number of "virtual" relativisitic nuclei forming momentarily into real nuclei for a very short time. However, you would then also have the basis for interactions with our own non-relativistic quarks. In other words, you would get a basis for our space-time structure.

Therefore, I conclude that they will get it, if my out-on-a-limb is correct.

That said, it would seem that they are close enough to the trunk that they got funding. So I still predict they'll get it.

Re:Okay, you're going out on a limb...

[Anonymous Coward]

n other words, gravitons are relativistic individual quarks.

err ... wrong spin(quarks-1/2, gravos-2), wrong metric behavior ... nice try though :D

about 'non-relativistic quarks' ... find those and you probably get a nobel (and trounce the standard model in the process). good luck!

I'm sorry... could you say that again?

[MickLinux]

And this time, name one true problem that science has truly solved.

Just to completely telegraph my hand: my reply, BTW, is going to be "and exactly how is that a problem?". If you can come up with a good answer, I'm going to then ask "and you say that science has solved it? Exactly how?" So think before you answer. I seem to remember that GTE used to publish a bunch of ads in National Geographic pointing out that science *can't* solve problems. It can simply give us more alternative ways to deal with them.

***sigh*** people should think before they post. I'll have to write myself a memo to that effect...

Re:I'm sorry... could you say that again?

[Izago909]

Polio, small pox, malaria, yellow fever⦠just to think of a few. Letâ(TM)s not forget that life expectancy is greater than 40 these days.

RE: where we came from

[crazygeek]

If we all came from the inside of stars, where did the stars come from ?

Gloiben

[Cackmobile]

I liek to think of my self as a bit of a geek but this is mind boggling. Stuff inside electrons? I learnt that electrons were pretty much the smallest thing round. Whats the stuff inside made of (i did read the article). Its amazing. I in awe of these guys.

Trying to be modest .

[anotherwjt]

Isn't anyone else scared . The first few people to find out what a crevasse was , couldn't say anything. I hate to think we are cave men hammering grenades with large rocks . And grenades only kill a few people . Science isn't one of the greatest when teaching to say 'I don't know' . Marie Curie is an example of science knowing . Anything that has a glimmer / possiblity of effecting gravity (gravitrons) has to be a worry ! Ahh.. but We will not know until we get there...

Actually, what I was referring to...

[MickLinux]

Actually, here is my understanding, also possibly quite faulty:

The supernova does not explode smoothly -- rather, it explodes quickly in some regions, and slowly in others. Further, hypersonic (megasonic?) turbulence creates "pockets" that are all at the same pressure and temperature, and in these pockets you get one kind of element or another kind of an element forming. So you really can end up with "gold" asteroids [though not many], or iron, or nickel, or what have you, but in large quantity.

That said, I don't know if my understanding of the theory is correct, and if correct I don't know if the theory itself is correct.

If you thought gluons were bad....

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes me worry about muons....

Re:How about we simply mod YOU down INSTEAD?

[karmawhoreaide]

Just nesting a post deep in the history of slashdot in hopes no one notices.

Re:(OT) Hear hear

[klui]

It's "hear, hear." "A shout of support or agreement. Originated in the British parliament in the 18th century as a contraction of 'hear him, hear him'. It is still often heard there although sometimes used ironically these days." http://phrases.shu.ac.uk/meanings/178100.html

Press conference = not useful

[Anonymous Coward]

And the bigger the press conference the less it is worth. Princeton used to hold a press conference every year - just before federal budget time - to announce their latest and greatest Fusion plasma temperature. It would always take them until the NEXT year to beat the old record - But they got the $ they wanted.... BNL is doing the same crap. Congress may be full of a bunch of stupid Lawyers but even they can figure this crap out - given a few years

Re:obligitory joke....

[billsoxs]

Man can have some of that stuff!!!! It looks like a good smoke

Re:Don't determine the mass of the the Higgs Boson

[fellip_nectar]

Actually, the Higgs Boson is estimated to have a mass of around 120 GeV