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."
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 -
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?
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
For anyone who wants to know something about this, from a source that actually knows something, you might want to start with the wikipedia article on the liquid drop model of the nucleus, and then this one on superfluids in ordinary matter (as opposed to nuclear matter). Nuclear matter in its normal cold state (as found in the nuclei in your body) is a fluid (known since ca. 1930), and is also a superfluid. The mechanism that causes superfluidity in the atomic nucleus is in some ways analogous to the mechanism that causes superfluidity in some types of ordinary (very cold) matter. It's also been known for a long time that if you heated nuclear matter up to high temperatures (on the order of MeV's per nucleon), the superfluidity would vanish. This is exactly analogous to what happens if you heat a superfluid like helium-3 beyond a certain point: it undergoes a phase transition and is no longer a superfluid.
This new discovery is completely unexpected: if you heat nuclear matter even hotter (to on the order of GeV's per nucleon) it may somehow become a superfluid again (maybe depending on other variables, like pressure). This is the regime where everything is moving at relativistic speeds, and the quarks may actually be free to move around the whole fluid, rather than being bound in sets of three within individual nucleons.
Find free books.
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.
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.