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Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid
Ted writes "Experiments at the worlds largest nuclear collider, RHIC, at Brookhaven National Laboratory reveal striking new features of the state of the early Universe. With RHICs enormous collision energy, the researchers can create matter that is composed of the fundamental building blocks of nature, quarks and gluons, in a state with temperatures of more than 1000 billion degrees. The Universe is believed to have been in this state in the first microsecond after the Big Bang. Later the quarks and gluons were trapped in the nuclear particles that the visible universe is composed of today.
Until recently, researchers have thought that the quarks and gluons formed a gas. The latest results from RHIC, however, indicate that under the extreme conditions just around the phase transition from quarks and gluons to ordinary matter, the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid - in fact an almost perfect liquid."
Of course, all their software is in CVS, so it shouldn't be too hard to check their calculations.
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The term fluid applies to both states of matter. I'm thinking the proper term for the universe would be superliquid.
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Superfluid means more than low viscosity. Specifically, it indicates that the fluid is a degenarate Bose system, which the quark-gluon whateverthefuckitis is not. But the article submitter probably reads science articles in Wired and the NYT, and thinks he can throw the cool-sounding jargon around without anybody noticing that it's bullshit.
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Yes, thousands of Billions, because people are too stupid to know that the word Trillion exists?
Well, now I know why nobody is worried about the US national debt. 7 Trillion is, like, practially nothing. Let me know when we get to 7000 Billion and I'll start getting worried. And don't tell me that millions of millions crap - it just gets confusing. Besides, a million isn't as much as it used to be. Inflation, you know.
Hint: after Trillion, the next is Quadrillion, and then (hold you breath) Quintillion. Gosh it's, like, a pattern!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
However, it may well be possible for solids to exhibit superfluid flow. How? Imagine the flow of a liquid, except that all the atoms in the liquid have a crystal structure, and that entire structure is flowing in lockstep while maintaining a rigid crystalline structure. When Bose-Einstein condensation comes into play, you can have macroscopic coherence of atoms across the entire bulk of material.
Kim and Chan at Penn State claim to have created a supersolid state of matter in helium (and now, hydrogen). It's arguably the biggest experimental result in condensed matter physics right now; if confirmed, it will probably mean the Nobel Prize. However, theoretical studies have so far failed to unambiguously predict the existence of such as state of matter; there are arguments for and against, and the dust hasn't settled. If other experimental groups can replicate these results, we'll know for sure, regardless of whether theory has caught up with nature.
For anyone who wants to know something about this, from a source that actually knows something, you might want to start with the wikipedia article on the liquid drop model of the nucleus, and then this one on superfluids in ordinary matter (as opposed to nuclear matter). Nuclear matter in its normal cold state (as found in the nuclei in your body) is a fluid (known since ca. 1930), and is also a superfluid. The mechanism that causes superfluidity in the atomic nucleus is in some ways analogous to the mechanism that causes superfluidity in some types of ordinary (very cold) matter. It's also been known for a long time that if you heated nuclear matter up to high temperatures (on the order of MeV's per nucleon), the superfluidity would vanish. This is exactly analogous to what happens if you heat a superfluid like helium-3 beyond a certain point: it undergoes a phase transition and is no longer a superfluid.
This new discovery is completely unexpected: if you heat nuclear matter even hotter (to on the order of GeV's per nucleon) it may somehow become a superfluid again (maybe depending on other variables, like pressure). This is the regime where everything is moving at relativistic speeds, and the quarks may actually be free to move around the whole fluid, rather than being bound in sets of three within individual nucleons.
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The parent comment is a non-sequitor.
The CMB results have very little to do with the Brookhaven RHIC results. The CMB uniformity tells you nothing about the hydrodynamic properties of the quark-gluon plasma. The CMB does tell you about the electron-nucleon plasma that happened later.
And yes, I am a physicist.
We are all agreed that 1 million = 1x10^6.
In the world (Britain, France, and Germany) where 1 billion = 1 million million (1x10^12), then 1 trillion = 1 million billion (1x10^18) or another way 1 trillion = 1 million million million (tri-million), or million cubed, to the power of three, as in tri.
In the parts of the wolrd (US & Canada) where 1 billion = 1000 million (1x10^9), then 1 trillion = 1 million million (1x10^12) so 1 trillion = 1000 billion.
As it is an American lab, it will be 1x10^12.
Personally, i feel the Americans just like their numbers sounding bigger.