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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.
'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.
Einstein already suggested something like this, however he never did any research since the soup wasn't kosher.
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.
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.
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
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
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
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.