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Science

Creating New Matter: Primordial Soup @ CERN 80

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-science dept.
hobgadling writes "According to ABC News, physicists at CERN in Geneva have recreated a "quark-gluon plasma", also known as the primordial soup, the state of the universe right after the big bang. The article here says that more experiments will have to be done at Brookhaven National Labs to prove this. " Brookhaven will be starting research in this area this summer - with much more powerful instrumentation.
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Creating New Matter: Primordial Soup @ CERN More

Creating New Matter: Primordial Soup @ CERN

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  • You're cool. I wish I was you.

    Make Seven

  • Official Page (Score:3)

    by sash ( 107931 ) on Thursday February 10, 2000 @03:37AM (#1289449) Homepage
    Lots of TV operators and media people around, here at CERN today.

    Please go and check the official web pages: A New State of Matter [www.cern.ch]

  • The article is unclear on this. Is primordial soup actually another state of matter like Gas, solid, liquid, and plasma? or is it just a form of plasma or something?

    Make Seven
  • It is certainly not just another plasma. The consituents (quarks and gluons) of the consitutents (protons and neutrons) of the neucleii of atoms are beleived to be out of their usual state (bound in triplets). I'd say that's a much more fundamental different than the different between gas and liquid.
  • How dense is this stuff? How many tons per square centimeter? If they produce sufficient quantities of this matter, you can create mini blackholes. I imagine they would imediately fall down, to the center of Earths gravity and suck our molten core dry. Scary thought.
    --
  • Now my science may be a bit rusty, but shurely this isn't about Primordial soup but primordial matter???

    Please correct me, and I know you will if I am wrong, but isn't Primordial soup a generic term for the beginnings of life, is the simple amenio-acids that were formed in the past.

    This experiment is about Primordial matter, discovering the origins of matter rather than 'life'

  • Primordial Soup is the accepted term for the unknown collection of ingredients supposedly slopping about at the correct temperature etc for life to spontaniously form. This experiment is nothing to do with that state, it is more cosmological and seems to create the conditions shortly following an event, not the conditions required for it to spontaniously trigger.
  • I thought I'd heard that the latest thinking of great minds (such as Stephen Hawking's) was that the big bang theory was flawed, and that it probably didn't happen. True, or has somebody been pulling my leg?
  • To produce it, you have to give it so much energy (kinetic energy, that is) that yes, it will be very dense, but for a very short amount of time.

  • Re:Big bang? (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday February 10, 2000 @03:59AM (#1289461) Homepage Journal
    Close, but not quite. Steven Hawking's new theory is that there is no meaningful time 0, and therefore no singularity. Rather, space/time increasingly curve, when going back in time - similar to a y=x^(2n) function, where n is any integer number.

    That way, the further you go back in time, the smaller the Universe gets, but it never reaches a single point. As t approaches 0, the gradient approaches 0.

    The practical upshot is that, whilst the theory still says there was a Big Bang, there is no definable -point- for time 0.

  • We could have probably done this a few years ago if the SSC in Texas(?) hadn't been axed by Congress....but NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

    God forbid we'd put any real money into scientific research when there's so many third world countries needing handouts so their citizens can buy more American cigarettes....so many people who've gone down on the President that need investigating....so many Windows licenses to buy!!!!

    Put the budget surplus back into research. Maybe then we wouldn't lose any more Mars probes, blow up any more Delta rockets, and in a few years we'll all be driving Hover-cars with Mr. Fusions(tm) in the back.

    Dammit!

    Of course if this is what they think it is, this is damn cool. Maybe we can actually figure out a way to reliably produce and detect neutrinos next?
    Anyone have any links re: the big neutrino detector tanks set up last year?
  • to be fair to CERN this is not a term mentioned anywhere but in the /. article. Seems like they are doing some seriously high energy physics though, they talk about a fireball expanding at c/2, now that counts as quick in my book.
  • if you really think so, why don't you tell to
    netops@cern.ch
    ???
  • If you are interested in neutrinos, there's quite a lot going on. Check:
    Fermilab's MINOS [anl.gov];
    CERN's NGS [www.cern.ch];
    more in general, a page on Neutrino oscillation [anl.gov]

  • I thought I'd heard that the latest thinking of great minds (such as Stephen Hawking's) was that the big bang theory was flawed, and that it probably didn't happen. True, or has somebody been pulling my leg?

    What Hawking said was that since in the equations of relativity (dt/ds)^2 has a negative sign whereas the three spacial differencials - (dx/ds)^2 etc. - have a positive sign time appears in space-time interval equations as -ict, where i is the square root of -1, an imaginary number. His postulate was that we should accept this at face value rather than writing it off as just an artifact of the equations.

    This lead him to the idea of the universe being a 4-D hypersphere which is unbounded but finite, so that if you went far enough foward in time you would return to where you started. So there would be a cyclical evolution of the universe - a Big Bang type event followed by expansion, then contraction followed by a Big Crunch event, and so on and on. The idea isn't really that popular though.

  • Is primordial soup actually another state of matter like Gas, solid, liquid, and plasma? or is it just a form of plasma or something?

    Whereas the four states you mention are all different states of regular matter - the quark-gluon plasma is where the actual nucleons that form the nuclei of atoms have broken down. Normally each nucleon consists of three quarks (udd for a neutron and uud for a proton IIRC) bound together by combinations of the eight types of gluon, which are the force carriers of the strong nuclear force.

    Normally the gluons bind the quarks together so that you can only see them in combinations of either three quarks (the baryons) or a quark and an anti-quark (the mesons). As you add more energy to this system the force between the quarks actually increases (unlike gravity or electromagnetism) until you reach a point where you have pumped enough energy into the system to create an entirely new set of quarks, also bound. This property is called quark entanglement and is why so far we have never seen a free quark.

    However at high enough energies quark entanglement breaks down and the quarks and gluons become free from each other, much in the same way that at high energies electrons and nuclei become free and form a plasma. This is why it is called a quark-gluon plasma.

  • Not that scary. Check out the article in the New Scientist [newscientist.com] on tha chance of this happening. Basically the ground will not open up and swallow you in a black hole.

  • Primordial soup, et al. (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday February 10, 2000 @04:30AM (#1289470) Homepage Journal
    Actually, it's not primordial soup. Unless Fred Hoyle knew something the rest of the world didn't, when he wrote "The Black Cloud".

    But, on the off-chance it -is- soup, I'll have a cup, with some cheese and a slice of bread, please.

    Quark soup is interesting, as it allows the formation of some -really- exotic matter. Most matter in this Universe consists of protons, neutrons and electrons. However, protons and neutrons are comprised of triplets of quarks.

    This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table. (You could form elements that had radically different natures. There'd be no neutrons, for example, so no isotopes. A nucleus would be kept stable with a mix of positively and negatively-charged particles, with the net charge being something really bizare.)

  • Hadn't heard of this one, but it makes sense. Doesn't GR basically say that the universe has a finite "radius" so-to-speak and that you'll end up back where you started if you could travel long enough. Looks like Hawking's carried that over into the time-dimension as well?

    Of course didn't GR also say that in order to end up back where you started it would take an infinite amount of time? (All mathematically speaking of course)

    Of course mathematically speaking it's possible for particles with imaginary mass to travel faster than light...*shrug* So if we can write off "imaginary time" at face value, being something "real", we should also be able to write off "imaginary mass" as being something that "is"?

    Show me the tachyons!!!

  • I got to see a presentation by one of the lead physicists working on RHIC [bnl.gov] (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colider) 3 or 4 years ago. Follows is as much as I can remember about it and quark gluon plasma (disclaimer: I have been out of the physics community for 2 years now, so some of my quantum may be rusty)

    In order to create quark gluon plasma you need a lot of energy. Most colliders work on the principle of getting light ions (like stripped helium atoms) and making them go really fast. RHIC decided that what would be more useful is to take really heavy ions (E = mc^2) and collide them. The will be using stripped gold atoms. (When I say stripped, I mean they got every electron off of them, all 79 of them) The have the two streams going in oppisite directions till they get up to speed, then ram them into each other.

    I'm going to butcher anything else I say about this, so go check out this cern page [www.cern.ch] for more info on quark gluon plasma. It has a really cool animation on their main page showing the collision.

  • With people attempting to patent parts of the human gene the boys at Cern could go one better. After all they can claim a patent on the Universe, no person has ever created a universe or its basic parts before so there is no prior art.

  • Insert "circumference" for "radius" above.
    Doh.

  • Doesn't GR basically say that the universe has a finite "radius" so-to-speak and that you'll end up back where you started if you could travel long enough. Looks like Hawking's carried that over into the time-dimension as well?

    It depends on what model of the universe you're looking at. The simplest models of the universe with a Big Bang are the FRW (Friedmann-Roberts-Walker I think) models which are based on Friedmann's original proposal in the 1910s IIRC. They were denounced by Einstein until Hubble made his discovery. In those models there is certainly a finite radius, as there will also be in any model with a singularity in it, since if the universe began at some point then it would take an infinite time to expand to infinite size.

    Of course, there are some more exotic models of the universe which can be formulated using general relativity. The NUT universe (named after the initials of its creators) involves a universe where if you travel 360 degrees around the universe once you end up in a totally different "slice" of the universe instead! I'm not sure of how wou'd work out distance and time in that universe :)

    Of course mathematically speaking it's possible for particles with imaginary mass to travel faster than light...*shrug* So if we can write off "imaginary time" at face value, being something "real", we should also be able to write off "imaginary mass" as being something that "is"?

    Show me the tachyons!!!

    As for tachyons, there isn't a problem with them in relativity AFAIK. A tachyon with zero energy however (and remember that nature always tends towards the lowest energy) is travelling at infinite velocity, which means it occupies every point in space-time simultaneously (if that word has any real meaning in this context), probably making experimental verification somewhat tricky. Anyway they are probably ruled out in the context of superstring theory, which avoids the tachyons that other theories have demanded.

  • Here it is on BBC

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid _636000/636886.stm

  • Terms such as gas, solid, liquid and plasma relate to the arrangement of atoms and molecules. In this new state, atoms, or even protons and neutrons don't even exist. They are broken down into their constituent parts, i.e. quarks and gluons. Jeff
  • Quark-Gluon Plasma (as seen on TV)

    Quark-Gluon Plasma brand glue is the product of space-age technology. It is excellent for bonding all forms of matter together, porous or non-porous. If you need to bond matter, we have the gluon for you!

    This amazing product of atom smashing is yours for the low low price of $19.20.

    (Keep away from children, oxygen, and other gaseous metalloids. Store in a cold (10K), dark, highly compressed place. If product is imbibed, rinse with talc, and self-immolate quickly. Use only in a well-ventilated noble gas atmosphere.)

    Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]

  • This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table. (You could form elements that had radically different natures. There'd be no neutrons, for example, so no isotopes. A nucleus would be kept stable with a mix of positively and negatively-charged particles, with the net charge being something really bizare.)

    How would you construct this type of matter. Certaintly at the conditions required to form the quagma (quark-gluon plasma) you could construct such a material, but at lower energies the strong force comes back into play and hence we are looking at quatum chromodynamical effects again. To acheive a colour neutral particle with two quarks we need a quark and an anti-quark, which is a meson. Is this what you mean, because we've been able to produce those for a while now.

    I think maybe you had something else in mind, but I wouldn't mind some clarification. Cheers.

  • Store in a cold (10K), dark, highly compressed place.

    Surely shouldn't that be store in a ridiculously hot (10^9K), bright space?

  • >I imagine they would imediately fall down, to
    >the center of Earths gravity and suck our molten
    >core dry.

    Well, actually, if there really was a black hole, 'down' would immediately become towards it, so it would be more like the Earth falling into the hole than vice versa. What a pleasant thought - everything and everyone being united in one spot. That's togetherness for you.

  • The article seems to be suggesting that you can actually see/detect the existance of these quark things... maybe i'm not reading this thoroughly enough but they don't seem to be mentioning how they actually detected these quark things. All it says is that, in so many words, you blast the crap outta sth to heat it up big time and little quarks separate from the atoms...

    I'm quite keen to know how they detected these little quarks spraying off

  • Doesn't GR basically say that the universe has a finite "radius" so-to-speak and that you'll end up back where you started if you could travel long enough. Looks like Hawking's carried that over into the time-dimension as well?
    While it may be aesthetically pleasing to think of it that way, I don't think the two properties are related. I actually thought that Hawking's idea had more to do with quantum mechanics than relativity, in that increasing uncertainty in the size of the universe would prevent it from ever actually being 0. I might be wrong, though. IANA cosomologist. However...
    Of course didn't GR also say that in order to end up back where you started it would take an infinite amount of time? (All mathematically speaking of course)
    That is definitely not right. Spatially, the universe is entirely finite (at least, that's the consensus). Circumnavigating it would take a really long time, longer than the current age of the universe, but it can and will happen (once the universe has been around long enough for the light of the Big Bang to travel from one end to the other.)

    Anyway, hasn't Hawking pretty much abandoned the "bounce" idea? I seem to remember him not treating it very seriously in recent editions of A Brief History of Time.
  • You know, these CERN people are really on the wrong track. If they would just learn how to make a primordial soup out of bogons and serve them with oyster crackers, my job would get a lot easier...

  • , no person has ever created a universe or its basic parts before
    now there is a question for the theologists!

  • If they produce sufficient quantities of this matter, you can create mini blackholes.

    Well, if you have a sufficient quantity of Hydrogen, you can get a black hole, too. I believe that in both of these cases, "sufficient quantity" is the stumbling block.

  • or is hawking determinist scum?

    I mean, the man has problems with some of the more interesting interpretations of QT and all.

    also (is it just me?) but what is this bs about the big bang.

    As a theory it is useless, it answers nothing. "So the universe started with a big bang? What came before that?"

    Call me naive, but the universe had no beginning and has no end, it is infinite in all directions and contains an infinite amount of 'dimensions' (current theory has 11 I am told). To believe anything else is futile

  • But, on the off-chance it -is- soup, I'll have a cup, with some cheese and a slice of bread, please.

    Presumably you could have fun naming any bigger particles that may exist in the soup, how about croutons and noodleons.



    EZ
    -'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
  • Have a bit of patience, boy - we're working on it.
    ;-P
  • Erm, excuse me. But wasn't there an infinitesimal risk of generating 'Strange Matter' by mistake? I'm no physicist, but I thought strange matter could drop local space into a lower energy state. Thus causing lots of problems for just about everyone within a few parsecs, if not more.
  • I happen to live in Geneva, where the CERN is.

    Whilst the discoveries they did there are, IMHO, really great and important regarding our knowledge of Life, The Universe and Everything, some factors are hidden for the benefits of Big Science (tm).

    The CERN uses a Large Electron Collider which is 27 kilometers in circumference. The nasty fact is the leukemia rate in the (populated) areas above and around the particle accelerator is no less than 19 times higher than in the rest of the region.

    Why did they build the 3 accelerators/colliders (two circlar ones and one linear) in a very populated area? Gee, that's just like having a nuclear plant downtown... I think that something our dear big brains should think about before "ordering" the next super particle accelerator.

    Does anybody have some kind of information regarding other big accelerators located in dense population areas and leukemia/cancer rates? Usually, this kind of info is angrily kept secret by the authorities, but who knows...

    Max

  • Generally, they look at the tracks left behind in the detector, which is a complicated 5-stage affair which I looked at in a lot of detail some years ago and then promptly forgot :) Since the detector exerts a very powerful magnetic field (approx 1 Tesla) the particles resulting from the collision travel in a curved path with the curvature showing the amount of charge and the direction it's curving in showing the sign of the charge. The other layers all have varying properties so that certain types of particle are stopped at certain points so that they can tell some of the properties of the debris.

    Once they know all this information, they can compare it with the properites of quarks they have already worked out from lower energy collision experiments over the last 20 years or so. If they match, it's a reasonable assumption that they've found quarks.

  • I'm quite keen to know how they detected these little quarks spraying off

    That's the fun part -- lots of house-sized detectors! The quark-gluon plasma expands and cools (actually "hadronizes", collapses back into more ordinary particles) long before they are detected. This means that you need to analyze the particles that come out of the explosion and determine from their properties whether they were created in an ordinary collision or whether a QGP was formed.

    As far as the actual detectors go, there are a variety of options -- from scintillation detectors that detect tiny flashes of light when a particle travels through a plastic paddle, to Cerenkov detectors that detect rings of light that form when a particle travels faster than the speed of light in the detector's medium, to time-projection chambers that use the particles' ability to ionize gas to create a 3D "CCD image" of the trajectories. Each detector type has its own advantages and disadvantages, and in the experiments at CERN and RHIC a variety of detectors are wrapped around the collision points. Check out NA49 [na49info.cern.ch] and PHENIX [bnl.gov] for two experiments that I've worked on in the past few years (although I'm a software engineer now).

  • I doubt there really is an increased cancer-risc for following reasons:

    1) In a cirkular accelerator all the synchotron radiadion goes off radially outwards - since the collider is built underground no one is affected above or on the inside of the ring.

    2) The kind of leukemia statistics you mention is most certainly flawed/biased and is worthless unless you quote the uncertainties with it. I belive we have heard a lot about this kind of "research" claiming that everything from cellphones to electrical systems cause cancer - if they alle were true humanity hadn't survived the last 100 years :-)

    the reason they build the next accelerators on the same spot is, that they have the tunnels allready.

    btw: The new hadron collider will cause less radiation than a electron collider does because of the much higher mass of the hadrons.

    Jonas
    --
  • Well, actually you are totally wrong. Since outside of Schwarzschild radius gravitational field of black hole is no different from one of a 'normal' body with equal mass (which is miniscule at the time) Earth would not immediately fall into the black hole, but rather black hole interacting with environment only gravitationally, would fall to the center of the Earth and gradually eat the Earth from inside gaining mass until the whole thing either implode or black hole evaporates due to Hawking radiation. BTW, can anybody estimate critical mass for the black hole to eat the Earth rather then evaporate.
  • it's not only possible for particles with imaginary mass to move faster than the speed of light, it is necessary. the speed of light c, is the limit of velocity as energy->infinity for both real- and imaginary-massing particles. the only difference is which end of velocity c bounds. for particles with real mass, c is the upper limit on velocity, while c is the lower limit on velocity for particles with imaginary mass. an interesting corollary is that a particle with imaginary mass travels faster with less energy. thus, a real-mass particle with energy zero has no velocity (0), while an imaginary-mass particle with energy zero has an infinite velocity. now, i don't know that infinite velocity is allowed (something with infinite velocity would have to occupy every point in space at any given time), but it sure does make things interesting. or maybe my physics is just off. int 21; the silicate
  • 10K = 10 Kelvin

    Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]
  • There was a big to-do a couple of years ago about a cluster of unusual cancers near
    Brookhaven National Laboratory [bnl.gov] (site of the RHIC [bnl.gov]).

    IIRC these were possibly connected to leakage of tritium and various nasty chemicals into the ground. There was speculation that this led to contamination of the local water supplies.

    I don't recall any allegations of this being directly related to the lab's research, just to poor handling of hazardous material. The scandal led to the replacement of the lab's management team.

    See http://www.oer.dir.bnl.gov/ [bnl.gov] for more information on their cleanup efforts.
  • Now we know what's inside Happy Fun Ball [uidaho.edu]

    Pity, happyfunball.com seems to be offline.

  • Just to pick nits...

    There are plenty of things made of paired quarks, they just don't last for long. (No relativity jokes please...oops!). For example: down and anti-up combine to form the pi-negative meson.

    (If my naming is archane, I apologize. This is not my forte. I'm stuck in Maxwellian times. ;-)

    Also, there's more than one periodic table. The one to which is referred in jd's post is the one of elements. There's also the one of nuclides. Changes in the nucleic structure probably wouldn't change much on the elemental level, at least no much more than isotopic nuclei do. What's interesting is what you can do besides atomic chemistry. Nuclear stability is hardly dependent on electric charge, it's not strong enough. ;-)

    (Hmm... Some might argue than protons and neutrons are not comprised of triplets of quarks, but that they are particular triplets; proton = uud, neutron = udd.)

    Learn to pick nits! And why! Visit The Underground Grammarian [aol.com]. (Check out the license too!)
  • can anybody estimate critical mass for the black hole to eat the Earth rather then evaporate.
    I can't recall the actual constant, but the Hawking radiation from a BH is proportional to the inverse fourth power of the mass, implying that the lifespan is proportional to the mass cubed. Even looking at the mass of a lead or gold atom, it's obvious that you could not form a BH from them in the first place; the uncertainty of the position of the nuclei is many times the Schwartzchild radius of a BH of their combined mass. (Schwartzchild radius = 2MG/c^2. G, the gravitational constant, is a very small number, c^2 is a pretty big number, and M for 2 gold atoms is less than 10^-21 grams.)
    --
  • Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table.
    Condense quark soup, or mix protons and anti-protons, and you do indeed get constructs made of two quarks. They are called mesons, and they are quite unstable. You will not do any chemistry with them because they become electrons, positrons and neutrinos in a rather small number of microseconds.
    --
  • This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three.
    The question is, will Campbells be selling cans of condensed quark soup now? I'd just love some Chunky Strange right about now...
  • The mini blackholes were already created and reside between your ears. They mainly consisted of anti-particles and annihilated most of the matter in your skull!
  • synchotron radiadion goes off radially outwards - Where did you get this from? Synchrotron radtion is emitted in a forward direction (or tangent to the particles circular motion)
  • Ok, I'm calling you "naive" like you asked. Try doing some research before you come out with this stuff - there is plenty of information on the internet about current theories of the universe. I'm not saying whether they are correct or not and I'm not in a position to do so, either - I'm not an expert physicist. You shouldn't rubbish theories before you understand them!

    Of course the universe has an end, and thanks to Hubble (and the space telescope named in his honour) we've seen it! Current theory dictates that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate - the "dark matter" that makes up at least 90% of the mass of the universe doesn't have enough gravity to hold the universe together, so in about 10 billion years (according to current theory) the "light matter" in the universe will be so much dispersed among the dark matter as to be virtually invisible. No light, no heat.

  • We could have probably done this a few years ago if the SSC in Texas(?) hadn't been axed by Congress....but NOOOOOOOOOOOO.
    Sorry. A quark-gluon plasma would not have been created at the SSC. The SSC was designed for detecting the Higgs boson, which is another animal alltogether.

    Quark-gluon plasmas are created in regimes which are both high temperature and quark rich, like the environments produced at SPS (CERN) and RHIC (Brookhaven). High temperature environments are produced wherever you put enough energy into a system. The SSC would have qualified for a high temperature environment. However, there just aren't enough quarks in two protons (6) to get a high quark environment. The SPS experiment smashed lead onto lead to get more than 1200 quarks into play. This was apparently enough quarks to get a bulk effect like a plasma to sustain for a short time.

    --The Yendi

  • I very seriously question the idea that science should be done by issuing statements to the press. If the experimenters at CERN wanted to state their case for the production of Quark-gluon Plasma, it would be taken much more seriously as a series of peer-review articles. I suspect most physicists don't take "science by press release" very seriously, after the lessons taught by the Pons & Fleischman fiasco.

    I suspect that there is enormous political and financial pressure on CERN to make some sort of public announcement to pacify European funding agencies; at least I hope that's the case. Otherwise, why bother with science? Just call a press conference and spin the evidence to the journalists that show.

  • or is hawking determinist scum? - I don't know about that. He presents his ideas and theories in an extraordinary and concise way. I think that his ideas have revolutionised Physice (perhaps not for us scientists) but rather for the layman. A Brief History of Time is a must for anyone with no scientific background.

    I am not challenging your point as I have never met the man?? From where are you coming from with this. I wish you have of elaborated your point I am quite interested in what others outside the "orthodoxy" feel about Hawking...

    "So the universe started with a big bang? What came before that?"

    If the universe started with a singularity it is almost impossible (according to what I can remember from 1st year physics) to determine anything (please correct me if I am wrong anybody I always am keen to be corrected and therefore learn more...)

    Science can only work on quantifiable data and singularities fall into the unquantifiable category I do believe. My Proffessor told me it was the job of philosophy and religion to give us these details because if you can't measure it or quantify it or falsify your findings how can it possibly be called "SCIENCE". Therefore I think your point is alittle moot.

  • or is hawking determinist scum? - I don't know about that. He presents his ideas and theories in an extraordinary and concise way. I think that his ideas have revolutionised Physice (perhaps not for us scientists) but rather for the layman. A Brief History of Time is a must for anyone with no scientific background.

    I am not challenging your point as I have never met the man?? From where are you coming from with this. I wish you have of elaborated your point I am quite interested in what others outside the "orthodoxy" feel about Hawking...

    "So the universe started with a big bang? What came before that?"

    If the universe started with a singularity it is almost impossible (according to what I can remember from 1st year physics) to determine anything (please correct me if I am wrong anybody I always am keen to be corrected and therefore learn more...)

    Science can only work on quantifiable data and singularities fall into the unquantifiable category I do believe. My Proffessor told me it was the job of philosophy and religion to give us these details because if you can't measure it or quantify it or falsify your findings how can it possibly be called "SCIENCE". Therefore I think your point is alittle moot.

  • HEAR HEAR!!!

    Plus did anyone actually read the article it even stated there:

    "In scientificspeak," Zajc says, "I think they've exceeded the bounds of the evidence by a considerable margin." "I believe they have broad hints for unusual properties in the matter they've created," he adds, "Not everything you don't understand is a discovery."

    I agree therefore that the peer-review system would be the proper way for scientific discoveries to be vetted. It does sound as if your theory on funding is correct. If other physicists are a bit shaky on taking the evidence at face value perhaps their only guarantee of funding was the PRESS.

  • Errm, really? Sorry, I don't get your point.

  • oups - sorry, you are right.
    But this doesn't change my statement, that any radiation from the accelerator will end up in the surrounding earth.

    Jonas
    --
  • Main Entry: Kelvin
    Function: adjective
    Etymology: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
    Date: 1908
    : relating to, conforming to, or having a thermometric scale on which the unit of measurement equals the Celsius degree and
    according to which absolute zero is 0 K, the equivalent of -273.15C

    Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]
  • They wouldn't be able to market it as a Universe. I'm pretty sure God has a registered trademark on that.

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