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?

Re:So are we making really short lived universes?

[Ayaress]

They've really only recreated a *possible* representation of the material makeup of the very early universe. The potential for learning about the Big Bang is pretty impressive from this, but it's really only a surface feature of the universe's beginning.

The Big Bang wasn't just a bunch of material blasting outwards into space. It was space itself expanding out of what was, effectively, nothing (The laws of physics break in a singularity, which was what the universe was to begin with. Science can't say anything about it, since there's no proximate way to study or model it).

Also, this plasma is still a form of matter, however torn-apart it is. The first picoseconds of the big bang were nothing but intense energy. Plasma formed after a short time, and eventually associated into "large" structures like protons and such. We're making this plasma.

To think this is making a short-lived universe would be like thinking that making a bunch of smoke and throwing debris around would be making an explosion. It's not the Big Bang we're creating, but its product.

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]

Actually, of those three, the only one to pose a large-scale danger is fission.

Fusion needs a lot of heat and pressure to occur. If a fusion chamber were to fail, the fusion would stop almost instantly, and a plume of hot hydrogen/helium would come out and rise upwards very quickly, where it would cool rapidly. The people near the reactor would be in serious danger, and an airplane directly over the plant may be in danger (Which is why it's a good idea to have no-fly zones over power plants in general), but people living a couple miles away would be safe as long as the fire department was running on time.

This experiment is another simmilar thing. It's just a bunch of plasma in a chamber. If it gets out, it cools rapidly and dissipates. Dangerous if you're sitting on it, but nothing to worry about otherwise.

Fission, on the other hand, can start cold, and even if it stops, the material you're left with is still radioactive. If fission stops, you just have a bunch of helium floating around, and it's not all that dangerous.

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.

Re:Thank God we're still alive

[Scott Carnahan]

The people near the reactor would be in serious danger, and an airplane directly over the plant may be in danger

Even this is doubtful. Because fusion is so efficient, there is no need for much plasma in a magnetic confinement reactor (current ignition attempts seem to work with densities on the order of 10^21/m^3 - about 1/10000 the particle density of the atmosphere at sea level), and should the walls fail, almost all of the excess thermal energy would be dissipated before the gas could leave the building. The main problem with a structural failure is the liberated magnetic field, which may throw chunks of metal around.

Save me Jebus

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, we should limit the experimenting to only those things that are well understood.

As opposed to investigating the unknown, we should create elaborate competing mythologies and kill all those who don't agree with us.

Good question

[Transcendent]

Have we re-created the first microseconds of the big bang in the lab?

Yes! ..oh wait... how the hell would I know what the first few miliseconds actually were like?

I think the only answer that you can respond with is "maybe."

Duplicate article

[hcg50a]

This article has the same subject and some of the same references as this one from yesterday.

Re:Duplicate article

[QEDog]

"his article has the same subject and some of the same references as this one [slashdot.org] from yesterday."

"Have we re-created the first microseconds of the big bang in the lab?"

The /. editors once again have re-created the article for scientific purposes

clever consistency = homonculi?

[Doc Ruby]

These plasmas are the beginning of production some of the finest quality of some of the subtlest characteristics of matter of which we are aware. Past revolutions of this kind gave us magnetic compasses from consistently oriented domains, optical lenses from consistently curved refraction interfaces, and lasers from consistently phased light. Each newly consistent material advance produced a revolution in mesoscopic properties, from aggregate subtle effects at the micro level. Even the oldest revolution of those I mentioned, in magnetism, is still underway at a rapid pace. Now that we are beginning to introduce order at the femtoscopic level, what novel properties of these classes of matter do you believe possible? Care to hazard a guess?

Re:clever consistency = homonculi?

[Ayaress]

This may be out in left field, but I'm thinking some revolutinary new form of Silly-Putty.

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

[Alsee]

some physicists feared that splitting the uranium atoms with a critical mass would start a chain reaction in the atmosphere... a total mass->energy conversion

The speculation was that it would ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Not only was it immediately found to be nonsense, but it was pointless from the start. The universe has smacked the Earth around with astroids and comets that make nukes look like PopRocks candy.

The Hiroshima blast was around 13 kilotons.
The Chicxulub impact was around 100 billion kilotons.
(Chicxulub was the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, it generated tidal waves, it splattered the earth's crust, it darkened the skies with dust and smoke, but it certainly didn't start a "chain reaction" igniting the atmosphere or starting a mass-energy conversion.)

synthesis of the first all-strange quark matter, fearing a chain reaction turning the planet entirely strange...
Now we're going for these exotic hi-energy plasmas

You forgot to mention the producing minature black holes.

And none of it is exotic. The universe bombards the earth with cosmic rays several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we can dream of cooking up in any collider we could build. There is a steady bombardment of "exotic strange matter" and "exotic hi-energy plasmas" and minature black holes raining down over your head every day.

Our "high energy physicists" are nothing but little children playing with pop-guns. If this stuff was dangerous then they universe would wipe out the planet several times a day with it's big guns.

-

Re:charmed life

[Ayaress]

Sorta-kinda-maybe. It actually was tested.

Hell, for that matter, most colleges do the experiment in Chem 100.

Here's what you do: Get a thin-walled container (a baloon works well), and put 2 liters of hydrogen (H2) and 1 liter of oxygen (O2) in it, rupture it, and set off a spark.

You'll end up producing a puff of water vapor which will dissipate very quickly (You can't drown somebody with this unless you have millions of gallons or something). What does damage with a bomb like this is the shock wave.

When you light off that 3 liter baloon, the sound is considerably louder than a gunshot. Some people in my chem class claimed it was even painful through their rifle-range earmuffs, and it was certainly audible through them. You set up a large bomb using the same principle, and it can collapse buildings or bunkers as well as an incendiary bomb, and much cheaper.

They did test it, but they never used it because inmost countries with advanced militaries, defence industries are major lobies. One of these water bombs can do, for a few thousand dollars (allowing for the $25 screws!) what most governments pay tens or hundreds of thusands, even millions, to accomplish with conventional bombs.

If there were any force in the universe that would cause our entire atmosphere to ignite, freeze, liquify, or turn into an army of naked women, it would have run into us at some time during the last billion years anyway, and we wouldn't be here to worry about it.

Re:charmed life

[Ayaress]

Most of these researches are funded for weapons production, which values maximum destruction.

It should be pointed out that the maximum destruction paradigm of war has passed. Thirty years ago, you couldn't get a nickle if your bomb wasn't at least 80 megatons, but look at most of the current arsenals. The largest weapons used are 20,000 pounds - ten tons. And the most heaviliy used weapons are ones that have a remarkably small yeild, and normally don't destroy entire buildings. Even during the Cold War, the arsenals actually used in Vietnam and other conflicts weren't much different than our current arsenals, minus the fancy guidance and targeting electronics.

You can argue pretty well that this isn't a humanitarian effort, but a capitalist one. After all, if you deploy maximum destruction too exensively, there's nothing left afterwards.

Most countries learned their lesson after World War II. We did such a number on Germany at the end of the war that there was hardly anything left worth occupying - and indeed, if it weren't for the US and the USSR both expecting the other to occupy the rest of the country the second either one flinched, there probably wouldn't have been foreign armies stationed there for decades.

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.

Re:No a complete picture

[Elvon Livengood]

The experiments in question aren't supposed to explain how or why the universe exists. They're designed to increase our understanding of what it was like at earlier and earlier points in its development, and to improve our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and energy.

The problem is not that "The laws of physics break in a singularity". It's that understanding the Planck era (first 10E-40 seconds, I think) requires reconciling quantum theories with general relativity.

And scientists don't make claims they can't back up. Not about their science, not if they're going to be taken seriously (i.e. keep doing science). The last notable time it happened was a couple of guys named Pons and Fleischman. Their careers did not benefit.

Describing a very sophisticated set of experiments is difficult. The people involved don't say "we can't explain why, but trust me we are right." They may point out that understanding a *real* explanation requires the equivalent of a graduate education. For public consumption, they have to give dumbed-down versions to reporters, even very smart science reporters. It's the dumbing-down process that leads to saying things like "re-create the Big Bang", because most people have no clue what it means to 'set up conditions similar to those of the universe at 10E-32 seconds.'

Being "tired of scientist [sic] making claims that they just can't back up" looks an awful lot like confusing science and science reporting, or science and policy.

Sounds like a spam....

[dackroyd]

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