Looking for Quark-Gluon Plasma?

uctbruce writes "Following the June press release from Brookhaven National Lab, nuclear physicists from around the world are discussing the results of the 4 RHIC experiments (PHOBOS, STAR, PHENIX and BRAHMS), the New York Times ran an article on the Quark Matter conference in Oakland. Have we re-created the first microseconds of the big bang in the lab? (Have a look at the Google cluster of stories)"

Comments

So are we making really short lived universes?

[kabocox]

IF they actually are reproducing the moments, are they making a really short lived universes that die because the following moments didn't mimic the rest?

Could each of these experiments create an another realty?

Thank God we're still alive

[linuxkrn]

It's a wonder with all the experiments with fission, fusion, and now big bang that we are still alive.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for learning and experimenting but just scares me to think of the magnitudes these could have. We have always been experimenting with things we don't fully understand. It seems to be just a matter of time before someone ends up blowing an entire country off the face of the earth... or worse.

Re:Thank God we're still alive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all for learning and experimenting but just scares me to think of the magnitudes these could have.

What the hell kind of mangled expression is that? An experiment does not generally "have" magnitudes. (Measurements and numbers have magnitudes.) An experiment may have implications or scope though.

charmed life

[Doc Ruby]

"There are some things Man wasn't meant to know, Homer - important things." - Ned Flanders

During the Manhattan Project, some physicists feared that splitting the uranium atoms with a critical mass would start a chain reaction in the atmosphere, destabilizing all nuclei within reach, thereby consuming all the matter of Earth in a total mass->energy conversion. They guessed wrong. Out in Brookhaven (only about 0.00528s from me, as the photon flies), there were similar concerns a few years ago, prior to synthesis of the first all-strange quark matter, fearing a chain reaction turning the planet entirely strange. Also turned out to be merely a paper tiger. Now we're going for these exotic hi-energy plasmas. And our high-energy and exotic-order syntheses are only accelerating in their frequency of invention. Most of these researches are funded for weapons production, which values maximum destruction. How long will our luck hold out?

Re:charmed life

[HokieJP]

I agree with your description of the H/O reaction, but I think there are some problems with your last two statements.

There are very good reasons why this isn't a practical weapon. First, the volumes required to do significant damage are huge. Imagine filling a 1,000lb bomb casing with Hydrogen and Oxygen. It wouldn't accomplish much. Of course, you could liquify it, but then your cost skyrockets. I think the closest thing to what you're discussing is the Fuel/Air explosive, which has the wholehearted endorsement of the defense industry.

Second, if I were a pilot, and someone suggested to me that I fly around a combat zone with a cannister full of hydrogen and oxygen under my wing, I'd decline. Remember the Hindenberg? Centuries of development have given us explosives with higher activation energies.

As to your closing statement: the universe is huge, and not at all homogenous. There are a great many things in it that haven't come anywhere near us in our planet's relatively brief existence. I'm not arguing for the atmosphere-liquification particle, I'm just saying that your reasoning is specious.

Re:No a complete picture

[Ayaress]

They didn't claim to have made what you say they did.

They say that they made a small amount of matter in one of its earliest forms following the big bang.

What can it tell them about the big bang? Well, we have this knolwege gap from about 10^-65 to 10^0 seconds as to what exactly was going on with subatomic particles. They it in with speculation, but they've never had any impirical clue how any of these exotic kinds of plasma and neutrinos they had populating the early universe would actually behave. If we did this experiment, and found out that this plasma was freakishly unstable and tended to decay into low-energy photons, then that would be a monkey wrench in our theories, eh?

That's the point of most theoretical experiments: If the experiment goes as was predicted, you really don't learn anything because you had a pretty good idea that's how it was to begin with. Its when things go horribly wrong (the mouse climbs over the top of the maze and makes a beeline for the cheese, or the guinea pig rolls over and dies from a carrot after swallowing 750 mg of cocaine a day for six months) that science really starts to learn things.

Of course, failure doesn't get funding, and they have to babble on about a lot of stuff we all knew already in order to fund the really interesting blunders they don't talk about.