What do you get when you turn the temperature up to a trillion degrees?Great. Just great.
Quite a heating bill.
Actually physicists claim that at this temperature nuclear material melts into an exotic form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma - thought to have been the state of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang.
Recreating this primordial soup is the primary purpose of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After five years of data, it appears as if RHIC may have succeeded.
But a big mystery looms over the detection: the putative plasma explodes more violently than predicted.
They're colliding heavy ions (gold), and don't understand what's going on.
Way to go, guys.
I remember being scared about this many years ago as a physics undergrad at Princeton, when this collider was first being planned. One of the professors presented a "back of the envelope" quantum calculation to show we shouldn't worry about them accidentally creating an exotic state of matter never before seen (quarkonium), that might catalyze everything to transition spontaneously to it, like the outward spreading of the freezing of the surface of a pond.
Turning us all into quarkonium.
I hardly found the "assurance" all that assuring, if they were even thinking that might happen.
Of course, they wondered if they might ignite the atmosphere and burn the planet to a cinder with the first atomic bomb test,and they were wrong. But that was just the pinkos.
But who knows, if they're trying to create the conditions similar to the Big Bang, might they not accidentally create a new Big Bang that will turn the Universe into a bubbling soup of particles?
Of course, they don't think so.
But honestly, they don't really know for sure.
So if you have a millisecond to wonder what happened if you suddenly find yourself being sucked into a black hole where once the Earth had been, now you'll know to blame RHIC and the pinheads at Brookhaven.
