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."

Comments

Re:I hate to sound like I'm trolling...

[millennial]

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.