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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."
Delicious first post soup
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.
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.
That wily ferengi finally found some way to cook up Odo and serve him as a soup.
'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.
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?
Imagine if two cars crashed together and their symmetry suddenly changed from bilateral to radial.
Play Command HQ online
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.
"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?
Einstein already suggested something like this, however he never did any research since the soup wasn't kosher.
And which one of you wanted the clean glass?
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thought biomedical researchers were "playing God".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A sort of light speed for heat? Interesting idea... Where are the armchair physicists when you need them?
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.
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?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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.
No soup for you!
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
There is or there isn't a hair in my quantum soup!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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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.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
Energies at the Large Hadron Collider are likely to peak at 14 teraelectronvolts
breaks down at the quantum level. This energy is in the order of 1018 gigaelectronvolts
100 trillion times more energetic than the LHC
If I convert all those frighteningly big numbers to scientific notation, I get:
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
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
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
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.
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...
Why can't
Yeah, sort of. Actually, thermodynamics and information theory are utterly entwined.
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.
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.
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."
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.
We can see galaxies from way back in time, there's no way we could miss it.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It took a lot of asking around, but someone finally pointed me the paper, which actually dates back to September.
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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.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.