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