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Space Science

Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid 405

Posted by timothy from the was-perfect-for-early-pancakes dept.
Ted writes "Experiments at the worlds largest nuclear collider, RHIC, at Brookhaven National Laboratory reveal striking new features of the state of the early Universe. With RHICs enormous collision energy, the researchers can create matter that is composed of the fundamental building blocks of nature, quarks and gluons, in a state with temperatures of more than 1000 billion degrees. The Universe is believed to have been in this state in the first microsecond after the Big Bang. Later the quarks and gluons were trapped in the nuclear particles that the visible universe is composed of today. Until recently, researchers have thought that the quarks and gluons formed a gas. The latest results from RHIC, however, indicate that under the extreme conditions just around the phase transition from quarks and gluons to ordinary matter, the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid - in fact an almost perfect liquid."
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Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid More

Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid

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  • i had suspected this for years (Score:4, Funny)

    by peculiarmethod ( 301094 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:12PM (#12288165) Journal
    indicate that under the extreme conditions just around the phase transition from quarks and gluons to ordinary matter, the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid - in fact an almost perfect liquid."

    This sfinally proves what I have been trying to explain for years.. the universe was born from a pool of beer!

  • Cosmic Egg Not Cooked Solid ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rewinn ( 647614 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:12PM (#12288171) Homepage
    ... resulting in Big Splat.

  • Obligatory Trek (Score:3, Funny)

    by codesurfer ( 786910 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:13PM (#12288176)
    Fluidic Space? I knew I saw species 8472 around here the other day!

  • That's one interpretation (Score:5, Informative)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:13PM (#12288179) Homepage Journal
    The scientists themselves suggest that the liquid state is one of a number of states that quark/gluon soups can take, but that the early Universe was still most likely a gas.


    Of course, all their software [bnl.gov] is in CVS, so it shouldn't be too hard to check their calculations. :)

    • Re:That's one interpretation (Score:5, Funny)

      by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:20PM (#12288240) Journal
      check their calculations??? Until 5 minutes ago I didn't even know what a gluon was... (I have heard of a quark... and no, not the one from Star Trek)...

      I couldn't check their spelling at this point... forget their calculations...
    • The scientists themselves suggest that the liquid state is one of a number of states that quark/gluon soups can take, but that the early Universe was still most likely a gas.

      That's what Mick Jagger said.

    • Re:That's one interpretation (Score:5, Informative)

      by Raindance ( 680694 ) * <`johnsonmx' `at' `gmail.com'> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:40PM (#12288394) Homepage Journal
      Right. To clarify,

      Matter can be in a "superfluid" state when in solid, liquid, gas, and plasma form (this is a fairly new discovery).

      The term "superfluid" has more to do with whether various properties obtain than being an actual fluid.

      • Re:That's one interpretation (Score:5, Informative)

        by jericho4.0 ( 565125 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:56PM (#12288516)
        Superfluidity is the complete absence of viscosity, something kind of hard to visualize in a solid.

        • Supersolids (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:12PM (#12288652)
          However, it may well be possible for solids to exhibit superfluid flow. How? Imagine the flow of a liquid, except that all the atoms in the liquid have a crystal structure, and that entire structure is flowing in lockstep while maintaining a rigid crystalline structure. When Bose-Einstein condensation comes into play, you can have macroscopic coherence of atoms across the entire bulk of material.

          Kim and Chan [psu.edu] at Penn State claim to have created a supersolid state of matter in helium (and now, hydrogen). It's arguably the biggest experimental result in condensed matter physics right now; if confirmed, it will probably mean the Nobel Prize. However, theoretical studies have so far failed to unambiguously predict the existence of such as state of matter; there are arguments for and against, and the dust hasn't settled. If other experimental groups can replicate these results, we'll know for sure, regardless of whether theory has caught up with nature.

        • Doesn't liquid helium come close to this state? Maybe I'm misremembering.

      • Re:That's one interpretation (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Its not a new discovery at all. Glass is a fluid and this has been known for years. All matter of any state can be a fluid. By state I mean solid,liquid or gas. So solids/gases/liquids can be a fluid. I think your confusing the word fluid with liquid/gas in your last sentence.

        States of matter and fluid poperties are totaly different things and are often confused. Hope that clarifies it alittle better.
        • Yes, technically, my last line should have read,

          The term "superfluid" has more to do with whether various properties obtain than being an actual liquid.
        • I am not sure that you understand what you are talking about.

          Glass is a fluid (a liquid,) it has never ever been a solid. The difference between glass and water is superficial and it is only due to difference in viscosity. Glass only looks to us solid because of specifics of our time perception. If we could percieve microseconds as we do years, water would have looked like a solid to us, if, for example, you tried to break it.

          I hope you will not insist that the state of matter depends on our subjective perc

          • Re:That's one interpretation (Score:5, Insightful)

            by perspicaciously ( 828688 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @11:56PM (#12289721)
            The idea that glass is a liquid is something of an urban myth derived in all likelihood from the method in which glass used to be blown.

            In fact, glass is an amorphous solid. If you heat it up enough, it becomes a supercooled liquid.

            The example generally used to explain how glass is a liquid is that in old houses the glass has "flowed" down over time and is thicker at the bottom of the pane than it is at the top. This isn't necessarily true, but when it is it's generally because of the very old Venetian method of glass blowing, before it became common to float molten glass on mercury to get panes with even thicknesses. If glass actually flowed at rates that were visually perceptible even after centuries, then optical telescopes that rely on massive lenses and mirrors to maintain accuracy to fractions of a second wouldn't last very long at all. This isn't the case.

            In short, mythbusted.
    • The scientists themselves suggest that the liquid state is one of a number of states that quark/gluon soups can take, but that the early Universe was still most likely a gas.

      Further proof, should you need it, that hindsight is *not* 20/20. I fscking hate that cliché; here is my public thanks for this story.

  • Perfect Liquid? (Score:5, Funny)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:18PM (#12288223) Homepage Journal
    in fact an almost perfect liquid - I knew it! The universe was created from a shot of vodka!

  • So Douglas "Hitchhiker's" Adams was right again (Score:5, Funny)

    by michaeldot ( 751590 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:23PM (#12288266)

    The Great Green Arkleseizure Theory [angelfire.com]

    "According to that most famous of sages, Douglas Adams, the Jartravartids believe that the entire Universe was, in fact, sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief..."

  • You mean... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jhurani ( 750697 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:25PM (#12288282)
    ... Astroglide [astroglide.com]?
  • cosmic microwave background radiation pretty much dictated this three years ago. [nsf.gov] Rest of comment is a rip off an article I did for K5 a few years ago that dealt CMB.

    The big bang theory gained more credibility today with some news released by the National Science Foundation and collaborated by a United States team called Maxima with astronomers from the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Berkeley.

    The soundwaves that were found are an impression of quantum scale energy fluctuations

    • No, it was not 'dictated' by CMB, you're talking out your ass.

    • Re:Not much of a surprise (Score:5, Informative)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:36PM (#12288827) Homepage
      You don't know what you're talking about. The material in your post was all known several years ago. The fact that nuclear matter at high temperatures can be a superfluid (not just a normal fluid) is entirely new and unsuspected, and has nothing to do with what you're talking about in your post.

      For anyone who wants to know something about this, from a source that actually knows something, you might want to start with the wikipedia article on the liquid drop model [wikipedia.org] of the nucleus, and then this [wikipedia.org] one on superfluids in ordinary matter (as opposed to nuclear matter). Nuclear matter in its normal cold state (as found in the nuclei in your body) is a fluid (known since ca. 1930), and is also a superfluid. The mechanism that causes superfluidity in the atomic nucleus is in some ways analogous to the mechanism that causes superfluidity in some types of ordinary (very cold) matter. It's also been known for a long time that if you heated nuclear matter up to high temperatures (on the order of MeV's per nucleon), the superfluidity would vanish. This is exactly analogous to what happens if you heat a superfluid like helium-3 beyond a certain point: it undergoes a phase transition and is no longer a superfluid.

      This new discovery is completely unexpected: if you heat nuclear matter even hotter (to on the order of GeV's per nucleon) it may somehow become a superfluid again (maybe depending on other variables, like pressure). This is the regime where everything is moving at relativistic speeds, and the quarks may actually be free to move around the whole fluid, rather than being bound in sets of three within individual nucleons.

    • Mod parent down - incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)

      by dr. loser ( 238229 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:54PM (#12288982)
      The parent comment is a non-sequitor.

      The CMB results have very little to do with the Brookhaven RHIC results. The CMB uniformity tells you nothing about the hydrodynamic properties of the quark-gluon plasma. The CMB does tell you about the electron-nucleon plasma that happened later.

      And yes, I am a physicist.
    • Like any 'explosion' fom a centre point, it goes outwards, so where is the centre of the universe, that is, a rough center like the center of a supernova. Or did it suck it self senseless in a wizzy dizzy of chaotic mess? Even then you can find the edges and compute the center. So where is this center.

      As skeptics are skeptic on aliens and crop circles, everyone should still be skeptical of a universe thats so young, can you really disproove 100% that the universe isnt infinite in size, but we can only see
      • You really need to grasp what is meant by Big Bang. Unfortunately the term tends to make people think of firecrackers or propane tank explosions. It is an expansion of space. The universe was once very dense and hot, and began inflating and cooling. There is no center to the universe, or rather, every point is as much the center as any other.
  • I read Lee Smolin's [edge.org] book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity [amazon.com] over Xmas and thought it was a good read. It provides a good overview to string theory and the inherent problems and proposed solutions.

  • For the scientific atheists... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:33PM (#12288339)
    Genesis 1
    -------------
    3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light
    ...boom...
    6: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
    "the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid - in fact an almost perfect liquid."
    "The Universe is believed to have been in this state in the first microsecond after the Big Bang"
    9: And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
    "Later the quarks and gluons were trapped in the nuclear particles that the visible universe is composed of today"

    Almost enough to make one a scientific believer. Finally, science is coming close to the Truth!

    (Please mod +5 troll lol)

  • "Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid" (Score:5, Funny)

    by TCM ( 130219 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:33PM (#12288344)
    Splendid, Mr. Data. Continue with your research. Dismissed.

  • Liquids and Gasses are Fluids (Score:5, Informative)

    by theblacksun ( 523754 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:37PM (#12288374) Journal
    The term fluid applies to both states of matter. I'm thinking the proper term for the universe would be superliquid.
    • Indeed, the definition of fluid also includes Plasmas and some plastic solids.

      The simple high-school chemistry definition is matter with no definite shape.

      Wikipedia article here [wikipedia.org].

    • Yes, but one is compressible and the other is (largely) not. Solids also flow, if the particles are small enough, but that is not at the molecular level.

      I'm thinking the proper term for the universe would be "superconfusing" for most non-PhD reseachers without funding. With funding dollars, it all becomes clearer.

  • This ain't superfluid, dammit. (Score:5, Informative)

    by caffeinated_bunsen ( 179721 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:37PM (#12288377)
    First the nanotube article, which made the mistake of thinking "really good conductor == superconductor" and now "really low-viscosity fluid == superfluid."

    Superfluid means more than low viscosity. Specifically, it indicates that the fluid is a degenarate Bose system, which the quark-gluon whateverthefuckitis is not. But the article submitter probably reads science articles in Wired and the NYT, and thinks he can throw the cool-sounding jargon around without anybody noticing that it's bullshit.

    • I had a degenerate Bose system. It wasn't always that way, but I knocked it over by accident one night.

    • Re:This ain't superfluid, dammit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @09:42PM (#12288884) Homepage
      Specifically, it indicates that the fluid is a degenarate Bose system, which the quark-gluon whateverthefuckitis is not.
      Some superfluids are degenerate Bose systems, e.g., helium-4. But some are fermionic, e.g., helium-3 [wikipedia.org], or nuclear matter in its ordinary (cold) state.

    • Re:This ain't superfluid, dammit. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Quantum Fizz ( 860218 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @11:41PM (#12289627)
      The slashdot writeup uses the wrong terminology, but it's a similar concept. So whoever put the title as 'superfluid' was mistaken and should have written 'perfect fluid'.

      A superfluid [wikipedia.org] refers to a viscosity-less fluid. The most common being He4, which is easy to produce, just cool liquid helium down to about 2.2K. This has to do with the quantum interactions between the helium atoms, and is similar but different to a Bose-Einstein Condensate. The He4 atoms have an even number of fermions (two protons, two neutrons, 2 electrons) and act like Bosons. Ie, they aren't restricted to Pauli Exclusion principle, and can all be in the same state.

      Another superfluid can come from He3, a rarer isotope of helium. The He3 atoms themselves, now having an odd number of fermions, act like fermions, and obey Pauli Exclusion. However, at cold enough temperatures (a few mK) they can pair together, thereby acting like a Boson, and can also form a superfluid. This is a process fairly similar to the Cooper pairing of two electrons in a superconductor (in the superconductor the normally repulsive electrons are paired through a phonon interchange mediated through the material's lattice).

      Now regarding the quark-gluon soup, the physicists are talking about a perfect fluid. I just saw a physics colloquium by one of these researchers a few weeks ago, and unfortunately I don't remember the details. But basically if you take a ratio or some other mathematical function of the viscosity and another hydrodynamic parameter I can't remember, like surface tension or something, in a perfect fluid these approach some standard value such as unity or zero or some such. (this confuses me now because the ratio in question is either zero or infinity if a helium superfluid viscosity is exactly zero, so this is why i am hesitant to say anything definitively about which mathematical function or quantities are measured).

      No such perfect fluid is known to exist, and of all known fluids the closest one can come to it is a cryogenic superfluid, which has a value like 4 or 4pi or something like that. All other known fluids have this value substantially larger.

      Regarding the quark-plasma soup, I believe the speaker said this wouldn' necessarily display the same properties of a quantum superfluid, maybe not perfect viscosity, I really don't remember exactly. I was trying to talk to him a bit afterwards, but I didn't know enough about the physics of superfluidity to really get into the details.

  • Mmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fjornir ( 516960 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:40PM (#12288400)
    Why you whippersnappers! I remember before we had Data suggesting superfluid universes we had Spock. Spock was always solid and reliable. Spock taught us how to be people none of this gibberish about the beginnign of universes... Why at Amok Time he said, ""It is undignified for a woman to play servant to a man who is not hers." -- and that's as true now as it was then.

  • We call it a Trillion (Score:5, Informative)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:49PM (#12288459) Journal
    Yes, thousands of Billions, because people are too stupid to know that the word Trillion exists?

    Well, now I know why nobody is worried about the US national debt. 7 Trillion is, like, practially nothing. Let me know when we get to 7000 Billion and I'll start getting worried. And don't tell me that millions of millions crap - it just gets confusing. Besides, a million isn't as much as it used to be. Inflation, you know.

    Hint: after Trillion, the next is Quadrillion, and then (hold you breath) Quintillion. Gosh it's, like, a pattern!
    • Hint: after Trillion, the next is Quadrillion, and then (hold you breath) Quintillion. Gosh it's, like, a pattern!
      You didn't even go to sextillion [wolfram.com]! If the drier technical definition is hard to grasp, just think of a sextillion as being the amount of pr0n on the 'net.

    • Re:We call it a Trillion (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not to us brits. Our have a different naming scheme, that counts by factors of 6 after a factor of 18, as opposed to by factors of 3 after 3.

      109 - millard (billion)
      1018 - billion (quintillion)
      1024 - trillion (septillion)

      And so forth.

      You insensitive clod! [onlineconversion.com]
    • Actually, in most places after billion comes 'billiard.' It's just us damn yanks that always jump the gun on these things and want to start changing the root of the word before we're supposed to.
    • <joke>
      *sigh* you're american so I suppose I can forgive you for ignorance.
      </joke>

      For pretty much everyone who speaks English (as opposed to American) until perhaps very recently it goes like this:

      10^3: Thousand
      10^6: Million
      10^9: Millard (not commonly used)
      10^12: Billion
      10^15: Billard (not commonly used)
      10^18: Trillian
      and so on.
      According to their meanings, Million means one set of 6 zeros. Billion means two sets of 6 zeros. Trillion means three, and then there's quadrillion, qui

      • Re:We call it a Trillion (Score:4, Informative)

        by sbryant ( 93075 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @05:03AM (#12290730)

        10^9: Millard (not commonly used)

        Not in English so much, but very common in German. A billion in Germany is always 10^12, and never 10^9.

        Damn those 17th century Frenchies for changing the 200 year old long scale to the short scale, I say! Well, the Germans may not be known for their humour, but they are very good engineers, and they don't like their mathematical standards being changed. Actually, the Americans only changed because they were on better terms with the French than the British after their revolution.

        I wasn't aware that the official scale in the UK and Oz had been changed, but when I did physics and maths at school, we never used "million" or "billion" as terms - we always had to specify large numbers like this: 1.234 * 10^12.

        Here's a link [pballew.net] with more info on the subject.

        -- Steve

  • Yeah Ted? Well there is a new Pope in town... And he is pissed! You have, as of late, chosen to acknowledge the existance of: 1- Quarks, 2- Gluons, 3- the scientific method, and worst of all: 4- the "big bang." You are a witch and will be prosecuted as such... just as soon as everyone gets back from the Imax theater.
  • You mean 4 parts gin, 1/2 part sweet vermouth and 1/2 part dry?

    Hmmm...martini...
  • Then the universe evaporated. Or uh . .. .something like that.
  • Stuff like this, for an observer like me, is hard to keep on top of. That wouldn't be a big deal, but I have to teach cosmology at the grad level. There go my class notes again. Dang it!
  • "Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfly"
  • Data suggests early universe was stupified?
  • ...the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid - in fact an almost perfect liquid.

    So what are you saying? It got them drunk? I mean, it's like beer or something, but no hangover? Cool.

  • The Bible says so (Score:4, Funny)

    by terminal.dk ( 102718 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @12:24AM (#12289857) Homepage
    Isn't that what The Holy Bible say ? First that was nothing, then there was water, then land.

    Guess the aliens that left the bible on earth was more advanced than we are

    • Re:The Bible says so (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 )
      Even then, I doubt that the big bang is what the bible referred to.

      See, the Big Bang was more like, first there was liquid, then there was GAS (a step utterly missing in the bible), then there was liquid again as gravity collapsed clouds of hydrogen, then there was plasma as the star ignited, then it went bang and it was gas again... and only after a few more such cycles you had enough of the heavier elements to have land as we know it.

      Besides, the last time I've read the bible it was more about Earth tha
  • If you cause too much of a stir about this *so called* "big bang" thing, President Bush might just pull the plug on the funding for this pagan science!

    Jokes aside, this goes a long way to galvanize the theories of hydrodynamics (see: fluid dynamics for wikipedia) [wikipedia.org].

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