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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."
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."
This sfinally proves what I have been trying to explain for years.. the universe was born from a pool of beer!
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
... resulting in Big Splat.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Fluidic Space? I knew I saw species 8472 around here the other day!
Of course, all their software is in CVS, so it shouldn't be too hard to check their calculations.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
in fact an almost perfect liquid - I knew it! The universe was created from a shot of vodka!
You can't handle the truth.
The Great Green Arkleseizure Theory
"According to that most famous of sages, Douglas Adams, the Jartravartids believe that the entire Universe was, in fact, sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief..."
... Astroglide?
The big bang theory gained more credibility today with some news released by the National Science Foundation and collaborated by a United States team called Maxima with astronomers from the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Berkeley.
The soundwaves that were found are an impression of quantum scale energy fluctuations carried to earth by cosmic microwave background radiation. Scientists were able to measure the waves by looking at cosmic microwave background (CMB). These early soundwaves are thought to have created super and giant clusters of galaxies with their travel. The soundwaves are actually contained in primordial plasma. They are effectively overtones or harmonics of the big bang explosion that is said to have created the universe.
These soundwaves are important because they show two things that are important for understanding our universe in addition to solidifying the big bang AKA inflationary thoery.
# First of note is that the study indicates that the universe is geometrically flat, not curved. # This study also gives credence to the thoery that most of the universe is composed of dark matter.
The discoveries were made by microwave detectors in Antartica, using baloons. The study involved only about 3 percent of the sky, and looked at temperature fluctuations of only 100-millionths of a degree celcius in the CMB.
Genesis 1
...boom...
-------------
3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light
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)
Splendid, Mr. Data. Continue with your research. Dismissed.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
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!!!
Obviously nobody profits from the fact that at one time, for a very brief period, the universe acted a little funny.
:-)
However, this has important ramifications in terms of physics. We now know the "what" and "when" - now we need to learn the "why" and "how." Knowledge is never wasted. This may very well be the first baby-step towards warp drive and gravity guns
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.
The term fluid applies to both states of matter. I'm thinking the proper term for the universe would be superliquid.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
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.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Why you whippersnappers! I remember before we had Data suggesting superfluid universes we had Spock. Spock was always solid and reliable. Spock taught us how to be people none of this gibberish about the beginnign of universes... Why at Amok Time he said, ""It is undignified for a woman to play servant to a man who is not hers." -- and that's as true now as it was then.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
I'll bite.
The universe is not 6.8 billion years old. It's far older and the proof is our sun. Sol is a third generation star, its makeup is proof in that it's a meager yellow dwarf which will grow large then collapse into a white dwarf. Its parent and grandparent detonated in an amazing supernova which led to the ignition of Sol.
The fact that our solar system is full of heavier elements is proof of our sun's age and lineage. Each atom of lithium, carbon and iron was created in the heat of a supernova.
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?
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.
The Friedmann equations which form the basis for standard cosmology in general relativity, treat the universe as a perfect fluid, a non-interacting medium characterized by only its density and (isotropic) pressure (the Weyl postulate). Basically, it treats whole galaxies as "particles" in a "cosmological fluid".
Yeah Ted? Well there is a new Pope in town... And he is pissed! You have, as of late, chosen to acknowledge the existance of: 1- Quarks, 2- Gluons, 3- the scientific method, and worst of all: 4- the "big bang." You are a witch and will be prosecuted as such... just as soon as everyone gets back from the Imax theater.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
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.
Tiny black holes couldn't be earth devouring. A black hole is a mass that has shrunk to the point to where escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. So a tiny black hole that was, say comprised of 200kg, would have no moure earth devouring ability (gravitationally) than a 200kg person.
if the sun instantly shrunk to a black hole, there would be no change in the earths orbit, or any of the planets, the gravitational pull would be _exactly_ the same as before.
Just some clarification on what a common misconception of blackholes being 'devouring' objects.
Entropy. Over cosmic scales, clumping together becomes the lower energy state due to gravity's small but extremely wide-ranging effects.
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.
Tequila?
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
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.
yeah.. umm.. see.. we have, as a society, moved beyond meta-physics and into real physics. thanks for playing though.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.)
I've been wanting to get paid for this imaginary time for decades, but somehow various employers haven't approved the timesheets. And they've not bought into the idea that I've been solving their problems on the existential plane and working while sleeping (or travelling to work). Then again, I don't have a Ph.D.
Fucking ungrateful bastards.
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.
Isn't that what The Holy Bible say ? First that was nothing, then there was water, then land.
Guess the aliens that left the bible on earth was more advanced than we are
You're halfway there, but for the wrong reason. A tiny black hole just bumps into atomic nuclei less frequently, since it is sitting in a big pool of them (the Earth, since it fell out of whatever created it).
The problem with all this, however, is that tiny black holes evaporate, and therefore won't stick around very long. Physics collider ones don't stick around long enough to leave the vacuum chamber, let alone fall through the floor. See also Micro black holes.
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.
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
The statement "The biggest collider" is not correct, a simmilar installation, but by ways larger is the CERN in Genf (Switzerland). The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) measures about 7 Kilometers, or 4.34 Miles in Circumference. According to the CERN Website, a new gigantic collider is planned, that will measure incomprehensable 49 Kilometers in circumference. Another new hadron collider is the TESLA Installation in Hamburg (Germany). It will be a Tandem linear Collider, with it's origin in the DESY complex, wich is a pretty large Research installation itself, check their Website.
EOF