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Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid

Posted by timothy on from the was-perfect-for-early-pancakes dept.

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."

12 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. Question? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    You know, there's something I always wondered...
    Why isn't the universe uniform, why does it have those awkward clusters of mass like milky ways and stars?

    Does it have something to do with expanding faster than the speed of light? (and the resulting lack of communication between particles I guess)

  2. I hate to sound like I'm trolling... by millennial · · Score: 1, Interesting

    But is there really a point to this?
    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?

    --
    I am scientifically inaccurate.
    1. Re:I hate to sound like I'm trolling... by millennial · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What's even more interesting is the concept that Stephen Hawking and others refer to as 'imaginary time.' Since, as you point out, time expanded alongside space, we can't really measure how old the universe is, since it may be infinitely old from any vantage point within it. (If space was ever infinitely small, then real time is infinite.)

      The 'microsecond' referred to here would be imaginary time. Not imaginary as in 'imaginary numbers' (which don't technically exist but are still useful), but imaginary as in non-relativistic. In other words, the entire process could occur in a microsecond if we reproduced it today, but in relativistic time, it may have, as you said, taken eons.

      --
      I am scientifically inaccurate.
    2. Re:I hate to sound like I'm trolling... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      You're very confused.

      First, different observers will measure different ages for the universe. But there is a preferred class of observers, comoving with the cosmological fluid (or equivalently, who view the CMBR as isotropic), which we can use to define an absolute "cosmological time" and measure the age that way. The Earth is very close to being in such a frame, so the age we perceive for the universe can be treated as a canonical age.

      The canonical age is also the longest possible time that can be measured; observers moving with respect to such a frame may think that the universe is younger than we do, but none of them will think that it's older (let alone infinitely old).

      I have no idea what you mean by "non-relativistic" and "relativistic" time; there is just time, measured by some observer, in a general-relativistic context. And this doesn't have anything to do with Hawking's imaginary time, which is something else altogether.

    3. Re:I hate to sound like I'm trolling... by Barlo_Mung_42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For now it's more of a philosophical curiosity than anything else. The search for the answer to the question of where this all came from.
      Look how many people in this thread posted some reference to Genesis. It's the same search in a way. But instead of just making it up or believing in the made up, this method tries to find some data to back the answer up with.

    4. Re:I hate to sound like I'm trolling... by xPsi · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The question is a fair one. First, I claim that understanding the universe is probably itself a pretty reasonable pursuit. But philosophy aside, the goal of the RHIC experiments is not primarily to study the early universe (although that is a natural consequence of what they are doing). The main goal is to study bulk nuclear matter under extreme conditions. "Bulk" in this context meaning "whole nuclei" as opposed to just a couple protons or quarks. "Extreme" meaning ultrarelativistic (v~c) collisions. That is, in effect, to study the phase diagram of nuclear matter (as opposed to "atomic matter", the usual stuff we do chemistry with) by heating it with violent collisions (the temperature of this fluid is estimated to be about a trillion degrees C).

      In principle, understanding the fundamental nature of nuclear matter could have tremendous technological consequences -- in principle. Direct technology from perfect partonic fluids will probably not happen in five years but perhaps in twenty, fifty, or one hundred years. In the mid-to-late 19th century, people asked the same sorts of question the parent is asking about electricity and magnetism: "what's it all good for anyway." I think we all know where that went. The Department of Energy in the US, the main benefactor of the RHIC project, generally supports this sort of basic research precisely because it often leads to huge technological breakthroughs.

      But it isn't just a pipe dream of future technology that drives the DOE. They know that in the process of simply trying to do something as crazy as finding a quark-gluon plasma or a perfect partonic fluid involves learning a lot of new stuff about existing technology and pushing it to its limits. You have to build massive detectors, huge computing facilities, and have ultra-fast electronics to handle the data rates. You also need to educate, train, and employ thousands of Ph.D.'s -- a sure way to ensure some fraction of the population are trained scientists. All of this drives technology in big ways the private sector just can't afford to do -- precisely because there is no profit involved in this kind of dabbling. But in the end everybody wins because even if perfect partonic fluids never become useful, the technology needed to figure that out trickles down perhaps contributing to vastly to future technology.

      --
      i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
  3. For the scientific atheists... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Genesis 1
    -------------
    3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light
    ...boom...
    6: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
    "the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid - in fact an almost perfect liquid."
    "The Universe is believed to have been in this state in the first microsecond after the Big Bang"
    9: And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
    "Later the quarks and gluons were trapped in the nuclear particles that the visible universe is composed of today"

    Almost enough to make one a scientific believer. Finally, science is coming close to the Truth!

    (Please mod +5 troll lol)

  4. Bible reference by beaver1024 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.Genesis 1:1-2.

  5. Re:Not much of a surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I don't think you know what you're talking about, either. The RHIC results being discussed are not referring to a superfluid state of matter; read the papers yourself. No mention of superfluidity, just of a low-viscosity, rapidly thermalizing liquid -- what they refer to as a "color glass condensate". (This is not to say that superfluidity can't occur in QCD; it's just not what the article is talking about.)

  6. Re:That's one interpretation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    My physics instructor used to work there on the STAR project. He recently gave a presentation on this and he said he is not entirely convinced they have enough data to speculate that far.

  7. Re:That's one interpretation by midav · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I am not sure that you understand what you are talking about.

    Glass is a fluid (a liquid,) it has never ever been a solid. The difference between glass and water is superficial and it is only due to difference in viscosity. Glass only looks to us solid because of specifics of our time perception. If we could percieve microseconds as we do years, water would have looked like a solid to us, if, for example, you tried to break it.

    I hope you will not insist that the state of matter depends on our subjective perception of time.

    Solids are crystals, molecules of which keep order on distances much greater then distance between the neighboring molecules.

    Order distance in liquids (fluids) is comparable with the distance between the molecules. And, finally, gases do not have order at all.

    I am not aware that there is any other definition of solids, liquids and gases. OTOH, if you tell me how to tell a liquid from a fluid, perhaps, I'll learn something new.

  8. Re:1 trillion by leehwtsohg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    To make things more interesting, german also has "milliarde", "billiarde", "trilliarde"
    milliarde = 1000 million (UK) = 1 billion (US) = 10^9
    billiarde = 1000 billion (UK) = 1 quadrillion (US)= 10^15
    trilliarde = 1000 trillion (UK) = 1 sextillion= 10^21

    (It seems that this is also sometimes used in english - milliard, billiard, triliard(?))