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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."
Keep in mind that there have been mathematical formulas hanging around for over 500 years that were utterly useless until technology caught up and we found something practical to do with them. Science isn't about what you can use today...you take what you get when you make discoveries.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Seeking knowledge for knowledge's sake is a worthwhile endeavor. Every new piece of information leads to a greater understanding of the big picture.
Besides, "useless" knowledge often proves key to unintendend, unsought, useful advances.
I'm serious. What is the scientific benefit that we can gain from understanding what the universe was like for a microsecond? I'm honestly curious: is there a practical application to this sort of study?
To understand this you first need to abandon your familiar linear timescale, and learn to think about time logarithmically. This is also important for understanding particle decay times as well- strange particles were originally called "strange" because they hung around for 10e-10 seconds instead of the usual 10e-15 to 10e-20 seconds for particles based on up/down quarks. If particle physicists were thinking on a linear timescale, they would just say "gee all these particles are gone in a jiffy!" and we wouldn't have strange quarks today- with all their accompanying technological advantages!
Remember, the few billion years that the universe has been around is going to seem like a really short time 10e60 years from now. The slow-moving beings of that era are going to post to their discussion boards asking why anyone would care about what the universe was like for its first 10e10 years.
The idea that glass is a liquid is something of an urban myth derived in all likelihood from the method in which glass used to be blown.
In fact, glass is an amorphous solid. If you heat it up enough, it becomes a supercooled liquid.
The example generally used to explain how glass is a liquid is that in old houses the glass has "flowed" down over time and is thicker at the bottom of the pane than it is at the top. This isn't necessarily true, but when it is it's generally because of the very old Venetian method of glass blowing, before it became common to float molten glass on mercury to get panes with even thicknesses. If glass actually flowed at rates that were visually perceptible even after centuries, then optical telescopes that rely on massive lenses and mirrors to maintain accuracy to fractions of a second wouldn't last very long at all. This isn't the case.
In short, mythbusted.