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RHIC Finds Symmetry Transformations In Quark Soup

eldavojohn writes "Today scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory revealed new observations after creating a 'quark soup' that revealed hints of profound symmetry transformations when collisions create conditions in which temperatures reach four trillion degrees Celsius. A researcher explains the implications, 'RHIC's collisions of heavy nuclei at nearly light speed are designed to re-create, on a tiny scale, the conditions of the early universe. These new results thus suggest that RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe.' These new findings hint at violations of mirror symmetry or parity by witnessing asymmetric charge separation in these collisions."

140 comments

  1. Delicious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Delicious first post soup

    1. Re:Delicious by courteaudotbiz · · Score: 4, Funny

      But at 4 trillion degrees Celcius, isn't it a bit hot?

    2. Re:Delicious by algormortis · · Score: 3, Funny

      4 trillion Celsius refers to the collisions, not the temperature of the collider. At that small scale, it's not exactly "hot". Now if it were 4,000,000,000,273 Kelvin, then THAT would be hot.

    3. Re:Delicious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just think of all the law suits. This soup is an accident waiting to happen for very short time intervals in McDonald's near you.

    4. Re:Delicious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      blow on it a couple of times before you taste it.

    5. Re:Delicious by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      I can't figure out if you are trying to make a joke or something, but those two values are the same, and they are both very, very hot.

    6. Re:Delicious by martas · · Score: 1

      mmmm, quark soup... [drools]

    7. Re:Delicious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't figure out if you are trying to make a joke or something, but those two values are the same, and they are both very, very hot.

      woosh

    8. Re:Delicious by u17 · · Score: 1

      Maybe they meant 4 trillion Kelvin, that would explain it all!

    9. Re:Delicious by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Next thing you know, they'll be telling us it was made by the world's most powerful soup nazi.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    10. Re:Delicious by damburger · · Score: 1

      I'm studying physics, and I've no idea how hot that is because in particle accelerators you use electronvolts instead of kelvins to measure particle speed. Science journalism is so bad sometimes that the more actual science you know the more confusing the reports about it are.

      --
      If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
    11. Re:Delicious by RockWolf · · Score: 1

      But at 4 trillion degrees Celcius, isn't it a bit hot?

      It's OK, it'll cool down quickly.

      --
      February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
    12. Re:Delicious by budgenator · · Score: 1

      I'm studying physics, and I've no idea how hot that is because in particle accelerators you use electronvolts instead of kelvins to measure particle speed. Science journalism is so bad sometimes that the more actual science you know the more confusing the reports about it are.

      Brookhaven National Laboratory isn't a journalistic organization they're a scientific research organization and what they are referring to is the blackbody radiation from the quark-gluon liquid, the "light" or photons given off are a "color" wavelengths and power spectra that would be produced by a black body heated to 4 trillion C.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    13. Re:Delicious by Pictish+Prince · · Score: 1

      Damn, these guys can burn soup and they admit it.

      --
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
    14. Re:Delicious by Viadd · · Score: 1

      Much better than that 2 trillion degree quark vichyssoise.

    15. Re:Delicious by damburger · · Score: 1

      Don't dare patronise me. I sincerely doubt they internally work in Kelvins, and I am absolutely certain they do not work in degrees C. The fact is the photons given off by the particles will also have their energies measured in electronvolts. Having to work backwards from the blackbody spectrum constantly would be a major pain in the arse.

      Oh, and this is a press release; so it is quite clearly an example of science journalism, even if it is published by a science institution.

      If you understood the subject matter, rather than merely pedantry and wiki-linking, you would know that talking about the 'temperature' of a quark-gluon plasma is almost entirely meaningless. As is referring to it as a liquid. What they are working with here is entirely alien to the macroscopic world that we use to define things like temperature and states of matter.

      --
      If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
  2. Well, duh by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everyone knows that there is a slight asymmetry tending towards particles rather than anti-particles. It's common sense. It's the reason why the universe exists as matter rather thant antimatter.

    1. Re:Well, duh by hansraj · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Clearly we should abandon all science and just go with whatever our common sense tells us.

      Is symmetry breaking fundamental to the conditions in early universe, or is it just that we don't have big chunk of anti-matter nearby?

      If it is indeed fundamental, what causes it? You have a bunch of theories predicting that it is fundamental but the mechanisms of each theory are ever so slightly different. How are we supposed to test which ones are wrong if we don't go about doing these experiments?

      Those were just two questions off the top of my head. I am sure there are others.

      Maybe you were just going for funny mods but every time there is a story about fundamental physics someone jumps in to say that it is pointless.

    2. Re:Well, duh by bsDaemon · · Score: 3, Funny

      How do we know that we aren't the anti-matter and that what we think is anti-matter is really matter? Not so common sense, is it?

    3. Re:Well, duh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How do we know that we aren't the anti-matter and that what we think is anti-matter is really matter? Not so common sense, is it?

      It really doesn't matter. Just the same way that labelling negative charge as positive and vice versa doesn't affect anything.

    4. Re:Well, duh by History's+Coming+To · · Score: 1

      Because we found matter first, probably because there's more of it and we're made of it. Semantics, linguistics, that's all...

      --
      Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
    5. Re:Well, duh by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      Uh, if there's a broken symmetry then it does matter.

    6. Re:Well, duh by bsDaemon · · Score: 1

      but what about the anti-matter people? What if there are more of them? they could each touch one of us, destroy everyone, and they'd have more left over, so they'd win...

    7. Re:Well, duh by mhajicek · · Score: 1

      Unless they got it backwards and what we call matter is really antimatter... (sarcasm)

    8. Re:Well, duh by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Funny

      How do we know that we aren't the anti-matter and that what we think is anti-matter is really matter?

      We know because most of us are not wearing goatees.

    9. Re:Well, duh by Ragzouken · · Score: 1

      If the universe existed as antimatter that would indicate the same asymmetry.

    10. Re:Well, duh by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      There doesn't seem to be enough anti-matter in the observable universe for that to be a problem, which is kinda the point of all of this. We're trying to sort out how exactly it is that matter, at least in the observable universe, outweighs antimatter by many orders of magnitude.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    11. Re:Well, duh by MartinSchou · · Score: 1

      There doesn't seem to be enough anti-matter in the observable universe for that to be a problem

      All of a sudden I had this really cool image of two galaxies colliding, one made of anti-matter the other of regular matter.

      Biiiig badaboom!

    12. Re:Well, duh by KarrdeSW · · Score: 2, Insightful

      matter

      matter

      matter

      You're all overloading my brain with almost-puns... now I can't distinguish the funny posts from ones with valid points!

    13. Re:Well, duh by martas · · Score: 1

      so does that mean that if France came into contact with another country, there'd be a burst of gamma rays so intense that it would eventually wipe out half the galaxy?

    14. Re:Well, duh by Americium · · Score: 1

      It's irrelevant if you call us matter or anti-matter. We have defined matter as the stuff we are made out of, and anti-matter, it's opposite that we don't find any of.

      We look all around the universe and only see matter, i.e. all the stars, planets, gas, and blackholes that we see are made out of matter. If there was even a little bit of anti-matter it would annihilate with interstellar or intergalactic gas immediately. It's incredibly hard to create lasting quantities of anti-matter, since you have to keep it suspended in a vacuum, making sure that no matter touches it.

      According to the standard model, when the big bang occurred equal amounts of matter and anti-matter should have been created. This would lead to all the matter and anti-matter annihilating and no matter existing in the universe at all. Obviously this didn't happen, so the model is incomplete. To explain the dominance of matter requires symmetry breaking, either in the creation or annihilation of matter/anti-matter. But there are lots of possibilities, it could be a major break in symmetry that hasn't been discovered but can be found out using CERN or this acceleator, or something very much harder to discover - perhaps the symmetry only breaks in a single possibility of certain particle interactions at extremely high energies, so high you need the energy of an entire galaxy to power your particle accelerator.

    15. Re:Well, duh by amRadioHed · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think the idea that we just don't have a big chunk of anti-matter nearby has been pretty much ruled out. If there were big chunks of anti-matter somewhere in the universe, then there would be border areas where they meet big chunks of regular matter and that should be very easy to spot.

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    16. Re:Well, duh by Warbothong · · Score: 1

      How do we know that we aren't the anti-matter and that what we think is anti-matter is really matter? Not so common sense, is it?

      Erm... Because we invented the arbitrary labels "matter" and "anti-matter", and they have little to do with the Universe and much more to do with our internal thinking apparatus and the ways we interface them with each other (talking, writing, etc.)...

    17. Re:Well, duh by khallow · · Score: 1

      If there were big chunks of anti-matter somewhere in the universe, then there would be border areas where they meet big chunks of regular matter and that should be very easy to spot.

      Unless the border region were beyond our horizon of observation.

    18. Re:Well, duh by lennier · · Score: 1

      Everyone knows that there is a slight asymmetry tending towards particles rather than anti-particles. It's common sense. It's the reason why the universe exists as matter rather thant antimatter.

      Do we? I thought maybe they were exactly equal, and there'd been a huge bang when matter and antimatter annihilated themselves and we were a tiny local cluster of matter bits which got missed.

      --
      You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
    19. Re:Well, duh by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      So everyone speaks about LHC possibly creating earth-eating black holes, and then the people at RHIC break a fundamental symmetry, and nobody warned us. Surely they'll soon turn every matter in the surrounding into antimatter, ultimately annihilating the earth in a giant matter-antimatter explosion! STOP THEM! :-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    20. Re:Well, duh by jitterman · · Score: 1

      Meh, it doesn't matter.

      --
      For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
    21. Re:Well, duh by lennier · · Score: 1

      How do we know that we aren't the anti-matter and that what we think is anti-matter is really matter?

      We know because most of us are not wearing goatees.

      Speak for yourself. *I* come from the planet which worked out how to kill millions of people in a neat airdroppable package.

      Isn't that what the Apollo plaque says? "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the Moon... we came to bring terror to all the galaxy. Muhahahaha!"

      --
      You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
    22. Re:Well, duh by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      What's the matter?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    23. Re:Well, duh by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      Everyone knows that there is a slight asymmetry tending towards particles rather than anti-particles. It's common sense. It's the reason why the universe exists as matter rather thant antimatter.

      Do we? I thought maybe they were exactly equal, and there'd been a huge bang when matter and antimatter annihilated themselves and we were a tiny local cluster of matter bits which got missed.

      And where's the corresponding antimatter gone?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    24. Re:Well, duh by SteveFoerster · · Score: 2, Funny

      Historically, it just tends to wipe out France.

      --
      Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
    25. Re:Well, duh by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      Actually, it doesn't even tell too much about our thinking apparatus. It's just that matter was known much longer than antimatter, and before we knew antimatter, there was little reason to call the matter antimatter, because after all, what should then be the matter?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    26. Re:Well, duh by damburger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Common sense? You can't apply your meatbrain savanna instincts to cosmic scale problems such as the composition of the universe. To quote Terry Pratchett's grim reaper, "YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS"

      You've not strayed from current physics knowledge here, but your reason for supporting sounds kind of flimsy.

      --
      If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
    27. Re:Well, duh by JoshuaZ · · Score: 2, Informative

      No multiple problems with that. For example, if the inflationary hypothesis is correct or some variant thereof then the universe is much larger than the observable universe so we might not just see the border areas. Also, matter is sufficiently spread out that this late in the universe serious collisions between the two would be rare, so as long as separate galaxies are either matter or anti-matter, we would see very little evidence of it. There are, as I understand it, more subtle ideas that suggest a true symmetry break, having to do with models of particle formation in the very early universe. Essentially, our universe looks a lot more like what one expects from a symmetry break than from a big chunk model. But I don't know enough to say anything in detail about what those differences are.

    28. Re:Well, duh by Chris+Burke · · Score: 1

      You have a point with expansion and the size of the universe... But as far as not seeing ones "this late" in the universe... When we look at extremely distant galaxies we're also looking at extremely ancient ones. Hubble's record is galaxies only 600 million years after the Big Bang. No signs of matter/anti-matter galaxy collisions at that time or more recently as of yet.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    29. Re:Well, duh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The "chunky universe" is unsatisfactory because it implies that our Hubble Volume was in a patch of space that evolved an atypically enormously high matter to antimatter ratio space after inflation. Ok, that could certainly happen even by sheer chance in a sufficiently large universe, but there is no reason yet to think that the unobservable (assuming that the metric expansion of space never halts, allowing distant photons eventually to arrive farrrrrr in the future) universe is sufficiently large that the odds of even one such matter-dominated patch would not seem incredible.

      An unknown broken symmetry might happen everywhere in the early universe, or at least lead to a reasonable probability of at least one patch (and ideally lots of them) of high matter to antimatter ratio space evolving after inflation.

  3. Laymen terms? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can I get a car analogy please?

    1. Re:Laymen terms? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      'RHIC's collisions of heavy nuclei at nearly light speed are designed to re-create, on a tiny scale, the conditions of the early universe.

      NTSB collisions of 18 wheelers at the speed of HWY 95 in North Carolina are designed to re-create, on a large scale, the conditions of the early universe.

    2. Re:Laymen terms? by Boronx · · Score: 2, Funny

      Imagine if two cars crashed together and their symmetry suddenly changed from bilateral to radial.

    3. Re:Laymen terms? by suomynonAyletamitlU · · Score: 1

      You see, cars are actually made up of smaller pieces (I know, right? Science has advanced so far). But the funny thing is that you can take these "car parts" apart and get even more, smaller parts, especially when you use force. But the smaller the pieces get, the more we begin to wonder how it all ended up making a car in the first place.

      That's why they're throwing really tiny minced-up bits of car at each other at really high speeds to see what happens.

      Yeah, no, that analogy breaks down pretty quickly.

  4. On the other side of the Universe.... by CorporateSuit · · Score: 2, Funny

    Some left-handed scientist just discovered that when puoS krauQ is cut through, it turns out symmetrical.

    --
    I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
    1. Re:On the other side of the Universe.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      puoS krauQ

      Qapla'!

    2. Re:On the other side of the Universe.... by EdZ · · Score: 2, Funny

      I read that as 'Soup Quark'. Undiscovered partner to the Crouton Quark?

  5. New Daily Special at Quarks Bar: DS9 by Orga · · Score: 1

    That wily ferengi finally found some way to cook up Odo and serve him as a soup.

  6. You totally miss the point by dreamchaser · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes but they do not know why, and research such as this may help reveal something about that.

    We've known you need air to live for millenia and some short sighted folk back then probably said 'duh' too. Others tried to find out why. Now we know why. Are we better off not knowing?

    1. Re:You totally miss the point by __aasqbs9791 · · Score: 1

      According to Arkham's Razor, we might be.

      Arkham's Razor: A theory which suggests that the simplest explanation tends to lead to Cthulhu. I wish I could take credit for coming up with that one, but I can't.

    2. Re:You totally miss the point by martas · · Score: 1

      sounds more like a guillotine to me...

    3. Re:You totally miss the point by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      sounds more like a guillotine to me...

      A quantum guillotine. Kills you and doesn't kill you at the same time. Unfortunately only works when unobserved.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    4. Re:You totally miss the point by Pictish+Prince · · Score: 1

      Yes but they do not know why, and research such as this may help reveal something about that.

      We've known you need air to live for millenia and some short sighted folk back then probably said 'duh' too. Others tried to find out why. Now we know why. Are we better off not knowing?

      Anti-matter is just regular matter moving backward in time so wouldn't it have all (except for a small fraction produced by high-energy collisions) been destroyed at the big bang instead of being created?

      --
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
    5. Re:You totally miss the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anti-matter is just regular matter moving backward in time

      No, a particle moving forward in time is indistinguishable from its anti-particle moving backwards in time, in terms of quantum states.

      This is time reversal symmetry, like the charge conjugation and parity symmetries. The standard model of particle physics is a quantum field theory that has a CPT symmetry, and so when reversing all three symmetries the dynamical behaviours of the particles under study are retained.

      It's commonly seen on Feynman diagrams as a way of reflecting the convenience of rearranging the sign and exponential factor involved in deriving a time-dependent wavefunction (e.g. in the evolution of a small system of particles) that includes antiparticles; it is convenient to depict antiparticles as having negative energy and moving backwards in time, and tempting to interpret the convenience as a physical explanation (the Feynman-Stueckelberg Interpretation does this, and it remains an interpretation of the standard model quantum field theory in that it does not distinguish itself in results compared with other interpretations).

      The Standard Model does not explain gravitation or the metric expansion of space, and it seems likely that particles and their antiparticles experience gravitation identically and that gravitationally unbound systems of matter and antimatter separate identically as the universe expands. Consequently there are one (probably the cosmological constant), two or more further symmetries that have not been proven (in part because we do not see large antimatter structures in the sky at any distance). Any such symmetry may explain the local lack of antimatter structures and the absence of primordial gamma radiation that would suggest a lot of antimatter formation during baryogenesis in our Hubble Volume. Alternatively, since our Hubble Volume is a tiny patch of the universe that was causally connected before inflation, we could just be part of a "lucky patch" that had an extremely atypical ratio of matter to antimatter during baryogenesis. There is no known or even speculative way of testing that, however, since the rest of the patch, and its borders with regions with more antimatter than ours, were separated beyond the ability to exchange information at the relativistic speed limit (i.e., c) after inflation ended, assuming the universe does not eventually stop expanding.

    6. Re:You totally miss the point by Pictish+Prince · · Score: 1

      Anti-matter is just regular matter moving backward in time

      No, a particle moving forward in time is indistinguishable from its anti-particle moving backwards in time, in terms of quantum states.

      [snip]

      Sorry my terms were not precise, but isn't that what I said (since the antiparticle of an antiparticle to a particle is the particle itself)?

      --
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
  7. DS9 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The owner of the bar that was selling the soup denied there was anything wrong with it.

    1. Re:DS9 by captjc · · Score: 1

      Rule of Acquisition #265: NO SOUP FOR YOU!

      --
      Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
  8. Can this thing make "strangelets"? by wisebabo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Any particle physicists out there who can tell (us) if this thing can make "strangelets"? I mean, I kinda buy the explanations of how the LHC won't make mini-black holes or if it does they will instantly "evaporate" but: 4 trillion degrees? Approximating the conditions not seen since the first billionth trillionth of a second (or something like that) of the big bang? And don't tell me that Nature regularly collides gold nuclei together in this fashion; they're not cosmic rays!

    While we're at it, are "strangelets" (or strange matter) real, I mean are they a proven particle? (And if so, how did they prove their existence without supposedly creating any?) Anyway, if this thing does make (one) and the planet gets converted into a glob of it, hopefully it'll happen at the speed of light so we won't feel anything.

    Also the phrase "symmetry-altering bubbles" when used in conjunction with the phrase "evolution of the infant UNIVERSE" makes me wonder just a little if they really want to be playing around with this stuff. At least I'm pretty sure that if a false vacuum bubble is created, it'll expand at the speed of light and we definitely won't feel a thing!

    - I actually love science and physics and have full confidence in these guys. It's fun to be paranoid every now and then though.

    1. Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > While we're at it, are "strangelets" (or strange matter) real, I mean are they a proven particle?

      The first six words of the Wikipedia article will tell you that.

      The answer is "no(t yet)".

    2. Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? by chrylis · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm not currently a research physicist, but I'm a (prior) collaborator on the experiment in question.

      No "strangelet" has ever been observed, and their behavior depends on certain parameters that are unknown... because they've never been observed. It's reasonable to guess at this point that the strangelet-eats-the-world scenario is probably bogus just due to the anthropic principle.

      The concern over the eating-the-world scenario was allayed to physicists' satisfaction based on calculations about cosmic rays. The kinds of collisions that would produce strangelets happen constantly to the moon because of the lack of an atmosphere or magnetic field to shield it, and the moon's still there. Statistics suggest, therefore, that these particular concerns are unlikely to be realized.

    3. Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? by mhajicek · · Score: 3, Informative

      And don't tell me that Nature regularly collides gold nuclei together in this fashion; they're not cosmic rays!

      Consider the particle collisions near the event horizon of a black hole; they're likely to occur at much higher energies.

      "Energies at the Large Hadron Collider are likely to peak at 14 teraelectronvolts. In contrast, the energies around a black hole would theoretically be limitless, says West. However, you needn't go beyond the so-called "Planck energy" - the point at which our mathematical understanding of particle interactions, in particular gravity, breaks down at the quantum level. This energy is in the order of 1018 gigaelectronvolts - 100 trillion times more energetic than the LHC." - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327253.800-black-holes-are-the-ultimate-particle-smashers.html

    4. Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? by Progman3K · · Score: 1

      if this thing does make (one) and the planet gets converted into a glob of it, hopefully it'll happen at the speed of light so we won't feel anything.

      There are those who believe that if these accelerators ever do create the exotic matter we are looking for the universe will instantly be replaced by something strange and inexplicable.

      There are those who believe this has already happened.

      --
      I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
    5. Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? by lennier · · Score: 4, Funny

      The concern over the eating-the-world scenario was allayed to physicists' satisfaction based on calculations about cosmic rays. The kinds of collisions that would produce strangelets happen constantly to the moon because of the lack of an atmosphere or magnetic field to shield it, and the moon's still there. Statistics suggest, therefore, that these particular concerns are unlikely to be realized.

      Or that the moon itself is part of the conspiracy! It got eaten by a giant strangelet millions of years ago and it's been watching us all this time. Pretending to be nothing more than a rock.

      Think about it, people. How did we manage to fake the Apollo landings so easily? Because the moon was in on it!

      --
      You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
    6. Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anyway, if this thing does make (one) and the planet gets converted into a glob of it, hopefully it'll happen at the speed of light so we won't feel anything.

      There is another theory which states that this has already happened...

    7. Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pedantic.

      >>1018 gigaelectronvolts

      is actually 10^18 gigaelectronvolts. Big difference there.

  9. Big Deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I did that yesterday in my basement using a toaster, a bathtub, some aluminum foil, and a microwave.

  10. Pedantic by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

    "four trillion degrees Celsius"

    When you're talking "trillions," there's really not much difference between degrees Celsius and kelvins. And all "four trillion degrees Celsius" means to the layman is "really fucking hot."

    So... why not just "4 terakelvins?" Or is it exakelvins?

    1. Re:Pedantic by M8e · · Score: 0

      So... why not just "4 terakelvins?" Or is it exakelvins?

      Because that does not means "really fucking hot" for most people.

      Terakelvin? Is that a terrorist organisation? Execute what?

    2. Re:Pedantic by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      As you point out, anyone who knows what a Kelvin is can easily do an accurate enough conversion. If the article did use Kelvin then everybody who doesn't know what a Kelvin is would be lost. Is that really hot? Cold? In the middle?

    3. Re:Pedantic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because to the layman, the SI prefixes are probably more confusing, and in the end, it's not really that temperature anyway. They're measuring energy, and expressing it as a temperature, because it's convenient for their use.

    4. Re:Pedantic by Khashishi · · Score: 3, Informative

      Usually, in high energy physics, temperature is given in units of electron volts. One electron volt ~= 11600 Kelvin.
      So this would be written, 0.4 GeV. Which is still extremely hot.

    5. Re:Pedantic by Anpheus · · Score: 1

      Well sure but it's a lot easier to say 4 trillion Celsius than "Four trillion two hundred seventy three point one five degrees Kelvin."

    6. Re:Pedantic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I find it baffling that you'd pick up on the (microscopic) difference between Celsius and Kelvin - but ignore the utterly meaningless term "trillion". Nobody in the sciences uses that word since it may or may not imply 9 or 12 or 15 (or whatever) zeros, depending on which part of the globe you happen you stand on.

      Oh, and 0.4GeV is nothing - the cosmic-ray spectrum peaks around 1GeV and cosmic-ray events have been observed another 11 orders of magnitude beyond that. Google term: "Fly's Eye".

    7. Re:Pedantic by el_gato_borracho · · Score: 1

      Electron volts are a unit of energy, not temperature. Those two are different physical quantities. For example, a test tube of liquid and a bathtub of liquid can both be the same temperature, but the bathtub holds more heat energy just because its mass is larger.

    8. Re:Pedantic by Apple1415 · · Score: 1

      Also known as the Kari Byron temperature.

    9. Re:Pedantic by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      The conversion from temperature units to energy is generally understood. Multiply by Boltzmann's constant to convert from temperature to energy. Temperature can be thought of as 1/2 the average energy in any degree of freedom of a system. Therefore, it SHOULD have units of energy. But we didn't understand the relationship between temperature and energy in the old days, so now we have a unit conversion between them.

      (Another way of defining temperature is the rate of change of energy per entropy, and should still have units of energy.)

    10. Re:Pedantic by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      oops. Twice the average energy, not half.

    11. Re:Pedantic by Pictish+Prince · · Score: 1

      Electron volts are a unit of energy, not temperature. Those two are different physical quantities. For example, a test tube of liquid and a bathtub of liquid can both be the same temperature, but the bathtub holds more heat energy just because its mass is larger.

      A very tiny unit of energy, the energy required to move 1 electron across a potential difference of 1 volt. Think of how many teraelectron-volts there are in a sneeze.

      --
      Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
    12. Re:Pedantic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The actual unit in particle physics is eV/c^2 -- the c^2 term is often omitted as a convenience (particularly when actually saying "electron volt"), and because it is very common to use systems of natural or geometrized units where c is set to unity (so c^2 = 1), but it's always there.

      eV/c^2 is a unit of mass. It is derived from mass-energy equivalence ( E = sqrt(mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2) where p = 0 and E is the energy required to move 1 electron across a potential difference of 1 volt, solve for m ).

      An electron at rest (not moving relative to the observer, and with neither electron nor observer experiencing any acceleration) appears to the observer at rest to have a mass of 0.511 MeV/c^2. That's its rest mass.

      By comparison, a proton has a rest mass of 0.938 GeV/c^2.

  11. Relativism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How come we can have an absolute cold, but not hot? 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun doesn't sound too impressive considering that the sun isn't particularly hot as far as suns go. So what's the hottest where absolutely nothing can exist?

    1. Re:Relativism by jeffmeden · · Score: 1

      A sort of light speed for heat? Interesting idea... Where are the armchair physicists when you need them?

    2. Re:Relativism by algormortis · · Score: 1

      That can never happen. Heat refers to basically motion. If there is a lot of motion (i.e. energy/heat), then it is obviously hotter. A particle can "not move" only so much, and there can't be conditions in which a particle cannot exist, yet still be in motion.

    3. Re:Relativism by mrsquid0 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The Planck temperature is the highest temperature that our current physics can work at. Temperatures higher than the Planck temperature require a theory of quantum gravity to understand. The Planck temperature is about 1.4e+32 kelvin. One day, when we have a working theory of quantum gravity, perhaps the maximum possible temperature will be higher, but until then this is the highest temperature that is possible assuming the laws of physics that we know about.

      --
      Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
    4. Re:Relativism by Jeng · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ok, so the guy above me here says that heat is motion.......ok, so the fastest that a particle can go is the speed of light and only photons go the speed of light....so whats the temperature of a photon?

      I wonder how wrong I am.

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    5. Re:Relativism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We can have absolute cold because that's when the particles are completely at rest i.e. they are not moving anymore. At this point it has no longer any kinetic energy. On the other hand there is no maximum to the kinetic energy a particle can have and thus no limit on the hotness.

    6. Re:Relativism by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      That depends on which definition of temperature you use. In thermodynamics, absolute hot would be negative 0 Kelvin. Absolute hot only exists for systems with limited number of energy states. When you add more energy, eventually you start to fill up the energy states and you can't add more energy. In this case, the temperature scale is pretty weird. Negative values of temperature are hotter (contain higher energy) than positive temperatures. When the system is at minimum energy, you are near absolute 0, then as you add energy, the temperature increases. When you pass 1/2 energy capacity or so, the temperature reading shoots off to infinity, wraps around to negative infinity, and rises towards 0. When you reach full energy capacity, you return almost to 0.

      This is only for the case of a system with finite energy states. As far as we know, the universe has infinite energy states, so there is no maximum energy capacity and there are no negative temperatures. It just goes up, up, up.

    7. Re:Relativism by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      Some space quantization theories purport that there is a limit on energy density of the universe, but I don't think any of these are mainstream.

    8. Re:Relativism by am+2k · · Score: 1

      Uh, following your argument, since there is a maximum speed a particle can only reach tangentially (the speed of light), so if motion = temperature, there has to be a maximum temperature as well.

    9. Re:Relativism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So you're saying that temperature is internally coded as a 32 (or 64) bits signed integer which can overflow at exactly half , and wraparound ?
      I suppose it's not just a nerd joke but this is actually how this works, if energy state = 1 bit. Would there be more direct relation between physics system and information theory ?

    10. Re:Relativism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wonder how wrong I am.

      You asked a question. Questions are not wrong. Actually, the questions you ask are quite close to the questions that were nagging the worlds best physicists around 1900. They knew that heat was motion, they had defined temperature as the average energy of a bunch of particles bumping into each other, and the theories worked out really well for a lot of cases. Unfortunately, their formulas gave nonsense results when calculating what kind of light would come from particles at different temperatures, which was a bit embarassing, since every kid knows that stuff glows when you heat it up.

      The answers came out of two theories that changed Newton's laws. Newton calculated the movement energy of a particle with mass m and velocity v to be 1/2*m*v*v plus the extra energy coming from attraction and repulsion by other particles. A short formula, and it's easy to plug in any mass or velocity. What people started realizing around 1900 was that it gives wrong results for some masses and velocities.

      First of all, in many cases, energy and momentum seems to exist in small packages that can't be divided further. Actually, the quantity that can't be divided is the "action" (Since you ask, the action is 1/2*m*v*v MINUS the extra attraction and repulsion energy, summed over time). Max Planck figured out that if action came in small packages, he could calculate the right colors for glowing things. As a reward, the size of an action package was called Planck's constant (written "h") and he also got some institutes in Germany named after him. The energy of a photon is E = h*c/w , c is the speed of light, and w is the wavelength of the photon. We can use his formula to predict at what temperature a chosen energy will dominate and the temperature that gives visible light is 6000 deg Celsius. That is the temperature of the Suns surface, which tells us that our eyes have evolved to use the light that's available. At higher energies we have ultraviolet, x- and gamma rays, at lower we get infrared and radio waves. I'm quite sure that the people at RHIC see lots of gamma rays in their experiments.

      So, photons have different energy but they share the same speed (c). The second major error in Newtons laws was found by Einstein - his theory of relativity showed that it goes wrong when the speed v comes close to c. In fact, the energy of any particle with mass will skyrocket when the speed gets close to c, and you will need infinite energy to get to light speed so that never happens, even if the RHIC comes really close. Instead, c is reserved for particles without mass (like photons), and they can never go slower. The "speed of light" was already named so Einstein had to invent one more theory of relativity to get a constant named after him, on the other hand everybody knew his name and he got all the girls (really, look it up).

      Later on, both theories was combined by Feynman (who also got girls) and some other people that were less entertaining. Anyway, in 1900, people were either asking questions like you, or they agreed with Kelvin that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now". Guess who was wrong....

    11. Re:Relativism by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      Yeah, sort of. Actually, thermodynamics and information theory are utterly entwined.

    12. Re:Relativism by algormortis · · Score: 1
      That was not my argument at all.

      So what's the hottest where absolutely nothing can exist?

      That is what I was refuting. I did not say that there was not a maximum temperature (although I am not aware of one), what I said was that there is no temperature at which "nothing can exist."

    13. Re:Relativism by am+2k · · Score: 1

      alright, now I get what you were trying to say :)

      However, since temperature is a property of mass, there isn't much to discuss there.

  12. Old news by algormortis · · Score: 3, Funny

    Einstein already suggested something like this, however he never did any research since the soup wasn't kosher.

  13. Obligatory... by hey! · · Score: 1

    And which one of you wanted the clean glass?

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  14. And religious conservatives by hey! · · Score: 1

    thought biomedical researchers were "playing God".

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  15. Devil's advocate by religious+freak · · Score: 1

    I really enjoy and believe in science. However... we're really playing with shit that we don't understand here; yeah, that's the nature of science, but this is different. Is "recreating conditions at the beginning of the universe" (yeah, I know it's somewhat of an analogy) on the only planet we have really the best idea?

    I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but have rational scientists even asked the question?

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    1. Re:Devil's advocate by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      > I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but have rational scientists even asked the question?

      No, nobody has ever considered the safety. Since you are so brilliant and have just thought of it by yourself, you should quickly write them a letter and tell them. I'm sure they'll be appreciative.

    2. Re:Devil's advocate by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Fear is the enemy of innovation and knowledge.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    3. Re:Devil's advocate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      have rational scientists even asked the question?

      Yes. And "rational scientists" should be considered a tautology. And there is no definitive answer to the question, because we have not done enough experiments to know.

      But if this eases your mind: we're talking about colliding particles that are at most a femtometer in diameter (which is a millionth of a millionth of 1/25th inch). Even if there would be adverse effects from the collision, it is not very likely that the effects will be noticable at an arm's length distance.

    4. Re:Devil's advocate by pwfffff · · Score: 1

      Yeah I mean what the hell are we gonna do if we end up with two universes? This one sucks enough as it is. If you're creating new universes clean this one up first plzkthx.

    5. Re:Devil's advocate by budgenator · · Score: 1

      "recreating conditions at the beginning of the universe"
      We've been doing that for quite a while now, 50 years ago we were playing around with the conditions that occurred a few seconds after creation, now we've turned to clock back to a few microseconds after creation, so they been asking the question for a while; but when they build one around the equator, I'm going to start worrying.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
  16. what a surprise, we need more money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    fcall me cynical, but it looks like a thin excuse for continued emploment

    rom the article
    "The discoveries at RHIC have led to compelling new questions in the field of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that describes the interactions of the smallest known components of the atomic nucleus. To probe these and other questions and conduct detailed studies of the plasma, Brookhaven physicists are planning to upgrade RHIC over the next few years to increase its collision rate and detector capabilities."

    in other words, based on these prelimminary, not exactly repeated byothers, to be published (but they didn't say if it passed peer review) results,
    GIVE US MORE MONEY
    after all, its really important to know what happens at 4 trillion degrees.....

    1. Re:what a surprise, we need more money by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not calling you cynical. I'm calling you a navel-gazing moron. Maybe you don't give a shit, and all the power to you, but trying to sort out things like symmetry breaking has been a goal of scientists for long time. And before you go on about how it doesn't put food on the plate or any of that crap, without basic research, the odds over the long-term of producing new technologies will decrease. Knowing what happens at 4 trillion degrees may not have any practical application today, but then again, neither did Galileo's or Newton's work have a lot of practical applications at the time, and yet we'd live in a more ignorant and technologically limited world without them.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    2. Re:what a surprise, we need more money by mrsquid0 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Isn't it cute when idiots try to act all clever?

      --
      Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
    3. Re:what a surprise, we need more money by Elrac · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not really, no.

      --
      When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
  17. Symmetry violations? by PPH · · Score: 1

    No soup for you!

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  18. Too Many Kevins by sexconker · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's way too many Kevins!
    But I guess it's better than having none at all.

    My home town nearly went to zero Kevins back in 1978.

    It was a particularly cold winter, and we were already down to 3 Kevins (due to their low popularity at the time).

    Kevin Thomas had flown out to be with his son's family for a wedding and got stuck in Boston for a whole week due to the weather. 2 Kevins left.

    Kevin Lemmer was rushed to the hospital during my shift. I still remember the call from the EMTs as the ambulance was rushing toward us. "It's Lemmer. He's in bad shape. Drove right into the fucking ditch." We called the time of death at 6:15 PM.

    At 6:16, all eyes turned to room 2217. Kevin Spencer was 82 and on his death bed with leukemia. His family being Catholic, he had already been given his last writes. If he couldn't hold out until Kevin Thomas returned, we would be at zero Kevins. Sure, we had 4 perfectly healthy Calvins, but they're just not the same.

    It was 7:15 when Carla Brooks and her husband James burst through the main entrance. "She's not due for 2 weeks!", James exclaimed. As the staff bustled around getting the Brookses settled, they exchanged darting glances with each other. This was their first child, and they wanted to keep the baby's sex a secret. Of course, in a small town, secrets don't get kept. Nearly all of the hospital staff new that the child about to rip open Mrs. Brooks was indeed a boy.

    The delivery was routine, and Kevin Brooks was born healthy, if a tad underweight, at 10:52 PM. Kevin Spencer was pronounced dead at 10:54.

    It was, as they say, a close one. Kevin Thomas arrived two days later, the weather having finally cleared up. To this day, we still rib him about it.

    Cedar Falls is currently at 5 Kevins.

    1. Re:Too Many Kevins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your score may stay at zero, but I had fun reading this anyway!

  19. Waiter! by rolandog · · Score: 2, Funny

    There is or there isn't a hair in my quantum soup!

    1. Re:Waiter! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      actually it must be there is and there isn't a hair in my quantum soup!

    2. Re:Waiter! by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      It's not a hair. It's a string.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  20. "quark-gluon soup?" by Khashishi · · Score: 1

    Better to search for "quark-gluon plasma" if you are looking for more info on this subject.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma

  21. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by Script+Cat · · Score: 1

    How do we know other galaxies and stars are not anti-matter. It's not like we can touch them and find out.
    Would it not be likely that thermal explosions could have sorted the two into far flung clumps in the early days of the universe.
    Interactions might not be observed if all of the clumps are already flying away from each other.

  22. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by amorsen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Galaxies collide a lot. You'd expect at least one of the collisions which we can observe to be antimatter-matter, but it hasn't happened. And it would be REALLY easy to tell if it did.

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  23. better off knowing? by Gary+W.+Longsine · · Score: 1

    That depends. Finding out why we need air to breathe didn't entail the possibility of ripping a hole in the space time continuum, with dire consequences for the solar system, the galaxy, and possibly the local universe. My money is on a certain percentage of Gamma Ray Bursters being the signature of an advancing civilization snuffing out its first really high energy particle accelerator, and its planet, and that the effects are localized to the vaporization of the planet or solar system. Since we're conducting our experiments on Earth, it's unlikely that I'll be able to collect, should any of you take up this bet.

    --
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    1. Re:better off knowing? by jeff4747 · · Score: 1

      Your theory would be interesting, if stronger collisions hadn't already been observed from natural sources.

    2. Re:better off knowing? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Finding out why we need air to breathe didn't entail the possibility of ripping a hole in the space time continuum, with dire consequences for the solar system, the galaxy, and possibly the local universe

      Are you sure? We only know that it didn't happen, not that it wasn't a risk!

      I'm just pointing this out so when the LHC fails to destroy the earth, you can say it was a possibility we lucked out on and not just uninformed paranoia. :)

      My money is on a certain percentage of Gamma Ray Bursters being the signature of an advancing civilization snuffing out its first really high energy particle accelerator, and its planet

      My money is on gamma ray bursts being the signature of an advancing civilization mastering the Intrinsic Field, when billions of Dr. Manhattans all depart their home world simultaneously to go explore the cosmos.

      The nice thing about this bet is that if I'm right, we will be here to collect, however money will have ceased to have any meaning.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    3. Re:better off knowing? by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

      Show me the possibility of ripping a hole in the space time continuum with the puny (yes, puny, very puny compared to many cosmic sources) energies we are using? Junk science can make for entertaining yarns, but it's hardly something to be worried about.

  24. Quark-gluon plasma by Rising+Ape · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Higgs mechanism is often talked about as the source of mass, but what's less well publicised is that it's the dynamics of QCD (the strong interaction) that are responsible for the majority of the mass of ordinary matter, by a similar mechanism. Essentially, the vacuum isn't empty because the empty state isn't the lowest energy state - that requires a non-zero Higgs field and a non-zero quark condensate (from QCD).

    The consequences of this are that particles behave as though they have mass when fundamentally they don't - they just behave that way because of their interactions with the background fields. If you excite the system to a high enough temperature though, there's a phase transition to the "free" state in a manner crudely analogous to boiling of a liquid releasing the confinement of adjacent molecules so they behave freely. In the QCD case, this temperature is low enough to be probed by experiments (not so much the electroweak/Higgs case), so we get free, low-mass quarks.

    1. Re:Quark-gluon plasma by lazy+genes · · Score: 0

      Are you speculating that there is no such thing as a Higgs boson? Maybe the field that produces mass can only be identified by what it has produced. Maybe this field has a fundemental structure that can only be assumed. Every object that was thought to be fundemental was eventually found to be made up of three other separate parts i.e atoms,quarks,neutrinos. Maybe you just need to hear this from Schrodinger's cat. The search for the Higgs seems to be redundant at this stage in the game.

    2. Re:Quark-gluon plasma by ShakaUVM · · Score: 1

      >>The Higgs mechanism is often talked about as the source of mass, but what's less well publicised is that it's the dynamics of QCD (the strong interaction) that are responsible for the majority of the mass of ordinary matter, by a similar mechanism.

      If mass really exists, which it may or may not.

      In general relativity, the concept of mass is kind of a vague one. Momentum is a lot easier to work with. Photons have momentum but no mass. What most people think of as "mass" means something along the lines of "solid" or "can't move through each other", but atoms have solidity due to the Pauli Exclusion Principle preventing electron waves from nearby atoms from interpenetrating with each other, not mass. Photons have the opposite effect, and try to enter similar states, hence stimulated emission and lasers.

      I'm actually curious about what the ultimate nature of mass really is. As well as the ultimate nature of spacetime, dark energy and matter (if they exist), the Pioneer effect, and a lot of other things. But without enough background in math (I only had two years of Calculus in college), I'm too frustratingly ignorant to calculate my ideas about these sorts of things. It's kind of frustrating.

  25. This doesn't make sense. by Elrac · · Score: 1
    1. Energies at the Large Hadron Collider are likely to peak at 14 teraelectronvolts

    2. breaks down at the quantum level. This energy is in the order of 1018 gigaelectronvolts

    3. 100 trillion times more energetic than the LHC

    If I convert all those frighteningly big numbers to scientific notation, I get:

    1. 1.40 E 13
    2. 1.02 E 12
    3. 1.00 E 14 * 1.40 E 13 = 1.4 E 27

    The parent is saying that the LHC puts out about 10x as much energy as that at which we lose all idea of what's happening. He's also saying that 1.02 e 12 is 100 trillion times 1.4 E 13. Something is not right here. Anyone care to set him/me/us straight?

    --
    When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
    1. Re:This doesn't make sense. by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      The 1018 GeV should obviously have been 10^18 GeV. Typical error doing cut&paste from text with <sup> tags.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    2. Re:This doesn't make sense. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Obviously a copypasta fail - no sup tag. You could just read the link the guy posted. 10^18 geV

    3. Re:This doesn't make sense. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If I convert all those frighteningly big numbers to scientific notation, I get:

      1. 1.40 E 13
      2. 1.02 E 12
      3. 1.00 E 14 * 1.40 E 13 = 1.4 E 27

      The parent is saying that the LHC puts out about 10x as much energy as that at which we lose all idea of what's happening. He's also saying that 1.02 e 12 is 100 trillion times 1.4 E 13. Something is not right here. Anyone care to set him/me/us straight?

      In the quoted article it's not 1018, it's 10^18, it looks like the copy and paste didn't carry over the superscript.

  26. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by cowboy76Spain · · Score: 1

    I think it may be no so obvious... think of it, galaxies that collide are probably from the same local group, so that we don't see matter/anti-matter collisions shouldn't be strange.

    I'll put a car analogy (in fact, the only reason of this post is to put the analogy): you are in Berlin a send a group of electric cars in a journey to Lisbon, and a group of diesel cars in a journey from Lisbon (and you go with them). Then you analize the crashes that happened in the journey, and since there are no signs of a collision of a electric car with a diesel car, you tell that all the cars were of the same type, and since yourself own a diesel car, you conclude that all cars were diesel.

    Of course, not much of an scientific argument as a pointer to a logical weak point in your arguments...

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  27. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by JoshuaZ · · Score: 1

    Not necessarily. Galactic collisions rarely involve actual collision of substantial amounts of mass. Most galactic collisions have the stars and other big objects never get anywhere near each other. The galaxies are deformed afterwords purely by gravitational effects. We can conclude from this that it is a) extremely unlikely for a chunk hypothesis and b) for anti-matter to have a repulsive gravitational effect on matter. But we've pretty close to completely ruled out b already.

  28. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by Pictish+Prince · · Score: 2, Informative

    How do we know other galaxies and stars are not anti-matter. It's not like we can touch them and find out. Would it not be likely that thermal explosions could have sorted the two into far flung clumps in the early days of the universe. Interactions might not be observed if all of the clumps are already flying away from each other.

    The only way to tell matter from anti-matter at a distance is to observe their neutrino emissions. Anti-matter objects will preferentially emit neutrinos in the direction of spin of the baryons (the majority of which spin in the same direction as the containing object assuming a magnetic field.) while matter objects will emit them preferentially in the opposite direction.

    --
    Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
  29. too many too may kevins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    thanks again sexconker, it was funny the first time :)

  30. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by amorsen · · Score: 1

    We can see galaxies from way back in time, there's no way we could miss it.

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  31. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by amorsen · · Score: 1

    The gas/dust clouds would collide, even though few stars do. Detectable. And if even two stars did collide, the explosion would be unlike anything we've seen so far. Impossible to miss.

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  32. the paper by bcrowell · · Score: 1

    It took a lot of asking around, but someone finally pointed me the paper, which actually dates back to September.

  33. Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) by Pictish+Prince · · Score: 1

    How do we know other galaxies and stars are not anti-matter. It's not like we can touch them and find out. Would it not be likely that thermal explosions could have sorted the two into far flung clumps in the early days of the universe. Interactions might not be observed if all of the clumps are already flying away from each other.

    The only way to tell matter from anti-matter at a distance is to observe their neutrino emissions. Anti-matter objects will preferentially emit neutrinos in the direction of spin of the baryons (the majority of which spin in the same direction as the containing object assuming a magnetic field.) while matter objects will emit them preferentially in the opposite direction.

    Actually, anti-matter stars emit neutrinos while ordinary matter stars emit anti-neutrinos, so if you can tell them apart and where they came from, it would make things a lot easier.

    --
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