Slashdot Mirror
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."
If time is a continuous loop that gets reborn, then it may all come from some goo (I think it was soup) I spilled in my school cafeteria back in the day. On the other hand, I would not have called it super fluid
http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/black_holes.htm
From the above URL:
Horatiu Nastase, a member of the high-energy physics theory group at Brown University, has written a paper, posted on the preprint website arxiv.org, in which he claims that collisions at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) produce the analog of a black hole.
Horatiu is referring to a mathematical similarity between the physics of the real world, which govern RHIC collisions, and the physics that scientists use to describe a theoretical, "imaginary" black hole in a hypothetical world with a different number of space-time dimensions (more than the four dimensions -- three space directions and time -- that exist in our world). That is, the two situations require similar mathematical wrangling to analyze. This imaginary, mathematical black hole that Horatiu compares to the RHIC fireball is completely different from a black hole in the real universe; in particular, it cannot grow by gobbling up matter. In other words, and because the amount of matter created at RHIC is so tiny, RHIC does not, and cannot possibly, produce a true, star-swallowing black hole.
This does not mean, however, that RHIC cannot study some of the phenomena that happen in the vicinity of black holes, as explained in a paper we wrote with Kirill Tuchin, also of Brookhaven's theoretical nuclear physics group. The explanation for this begins with Einstein's "Equivalence Principle," which states that gravity and acceleration (or deceleration) are actually equivalent forces. The principle explains why a person going up in an elevator feels slightly heavier, just as they would if gravity on Earth were stronger.
In the same way, the rapid deceleration of RHIC ions as they smash into each other for a very short period of time (about 10^(-23) second) is similar to the extreme gravitational environment in the vicinity of a black hole. This means that RHIC collisions should emit a bunch of thermal particles similar to the "Hawking radiation" emitted by a black hole. Since Hawking radiation is the cause of black hole decay, not formation, its existence would be yet another reason that RHIC cannot produce a real gravitational black hole.
I read Lee Smolin's book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity over Xmas and thought it was a good read. It provides a good overview to string theory and the inherent problems and proposed solutions.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Yeah...but what is a hotdog made of?
Nah... I'm incredibly glad I'm not in charge of finding out anything of importance of this magnitude. MAJOR props to anyone willing to go through those college courses to get the job positions to enable them to find out this cool stuff and share it with the world.
I sell out to The Man every day.
It's exotic matter superfluid turtles... ALL the fucking way down!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I heard that Gluon was one of the rejected names for Intel's new kludgy dual core processor. They decided it was a little too close to home..
The Debt To the Penny
Current Amount
04/18/2005 $7,773,389,225,454.06
04/15/2005 $7,776,849,150,918.91
04/14/2005 $7,786,560,972,566.27
04/13/2005 $7,792,607,796,216.29
Dont worry, it will never be paid back , so dont bother paying your CC back either, just keep it flat, or rising with inflation. Thats the point of inflation, keep it rising faster than debt and its covered, its all relative. Dont you know all money is created out of thin air from nothing, its just carefully managed so that only worthy people get it according to their earning potential which really earns money from other credit created monies.
(btw slashdot "Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.", stupid code guys)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2
And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
"I'm not sure why you're bringing glass into this but it isn't a liquid."
:)
I forgot the smiley, it was a play on the old urban myth about glass is a liquid.
It'll get modded 'off topic' now, you watch.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.