RHIC Finds Symmetry Transformations In Quark Soup 140
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Delicious first post soup
Re:Delicious (Score:5, Funny)
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I can't figure out if you are trying to make a joke or something, but those two values are the same, and they are both very, very hot.
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Much better than that 2 trillion degree quark vichyssoise.
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I'm studying physics, and I've no idea how hot that is because in particle accelerators you use electronvolts instead of kelvins to measure particle speed. Science journalism is so bad sometimes that the more actual science you know the more confusing the reports about it are.
Brookhaven National Laboratory isn't a journalistic organization they're a scientific research organization and what they are referring to is the blackbody radiation [wikipedia.org] from the quark-gluon liquid, the "light" or photons given off are a "color" wavelengths and power spectra that would be produced by a black body heated to 4 trillion C.
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Don't dare patronise me. I sincerely doubt they internally work in Kelvins, and I am absolutely certain they do not work in degrees C. The fact is the photons given off by the particles will also have their energies measured in electronvolts. Having to work backwards from the blackbody spectrum constantly would be a major pain in the arse.
Oh, and this is a press release; so it is quite clearly an example of science journalism, even if it is published by a science institution.
If you understood the subject ma
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Obligatory... (Score:2)
And which one of you wanted the clean glass?
Waiter! (Score:2, Funny)
There is or there isn't a hair in my quantum soup!
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Next thing you know, they'll be telling us it was made by the world's most powerful soup nazi.
Well, duh (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
You totally miss the point (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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According to Arkham's Razor, we might be.
Arkham's Razor: A theory which suggests that the simplest explanation tends to lead to Cthulhu. I wish I could take credit for coming up with that one, but I can't.
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better off knowing? (Score:2)
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Your theory would be interesting, if stronger collisions hadn't already been observed from natural sources.
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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 signat
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Show me the possibility of ripping a hole in the space time continuum with the puny (yes, puny, very puny compared to many cosmic sources) energies we are using? Junk science can make for entertaining yarns, but it's hardly something to be worried about.
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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?
Anti-matter is just regular matter moving backward in time so wouldn't it have all (except for a small fraction produced by high-energy collisions) been destroyed at the big bang instead of being created?
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No, a particle moving forward in time is indistinguishable from its anti-particle moving backwards in time, in terms of quantum states.
[snip]
Sorry my terms were not precise, but isn't that what I said (since the antiparticle of an antiparticle to a particle is the particle itself)?
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think the idea that we just don't have a big chunk of anti-matter nearby has been pretty much ruled out. If there were big chunks of anti-matter somewhere in the universe, then there would be border areas where they meet big chunks of regular matter and that should be very easy to spot.
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If there were big chunks of anti-matter somewhere in the universe, then there would be border areas where they meet big chunks of regular matter and that should be very easy to spot.
Unless the border region were beyond our horizon of observation.
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You have a point with expansion and the size of the universe... But as far as not seeing ones "this late" in the universe... When we look at extremely distant galaxies we're also looking at extremely ancient ones. Hubble's record is galaxies only 600 million years after the Big Bang. No signs of matter/anti-matter galaxy collisions at that time or more recently as of yet.
Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Funny)
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There doesn't seem to be enough anti-matter in the observable universe for that to be a problem, which is kinda the point of all of this. We're trying to sort out how exactly it is that matter, at least in the observable universe, outweighs antimatter by many orders of magnitude.
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All of a sudden I had this really cool image of two galaxies colliding, one made of anti-matter the other of regular matter.
Biiiig badaboom!
Re:Well, duh (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Historically, it just tends to wipe out France.
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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.
Speak for yourself. *I* come from the planet which worked out how to kill millions of people in a neat airdroppable package.
Isn't that what the Apollo plaque says? "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the Moon... we came to bring terror to all the galaxy. Muhahahaha!"
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It's irrelevant if you call us matter or anti-matter. We have defined matter as the stuff we are made out of, and anti-matter, it's opposite that we don't find any of.
We look all around the universe and only see matter, i.e. all the stars, planets, gas, and blackholes that we see are made out of matter. If there was even a little bit of anti-matter it would annihilate with interstellar or intergalactic gas immediately. It's incredibly hard to create lasting quantities of anti-matter, since you have to keep
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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?
Erm... Because we invented the arbitrary labels "matter" and "anti-matter", and they have little to do with the Universe and much more to do with our internal thinking apparatus and the ways we interface them with each other (talking, writing, etc.)...
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Uh, if there's a broken symmetry then it does matter.
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matter
matter
matter
You're all overloading my brain with almost-puns... now I can't distinguish the funny posts from ones with valid points!
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If the universe existed as antimatter that would indicate the same asymmetry.
Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) (Score:1)
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.
Re:Well, duh (For sure No Anti-matter) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I think it may be no so obvious... think of it, galaxies that collide are probably from the same local group, so that we don't see matter/anti-matter collisions shouldn't be strange.
I'll put a car analogy (in fact, the only reason of this post is to put the analogy): you are in Berlin a send a group of electric cars in a journey to Lisbon, and a group of diesel cars in a journey from Lisbon (and you go with them). Then you analize the crashes that happened in the journey, and since there are no signs of a c
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We can see galaxies from way back in time, there's no way we could miss it.
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The gas/dust clouds would collide, even though few stars do. Detectable. And if even two stars did collide, the explosion would be unlike anything we've seen so far. Impossible to miss.
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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.
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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.
Actually, anti-matter stars emit neutrinos while ordinary matter stars emit anti-neutrinos, so if you can tell them apart and where they came from, it would make things a lot easier.
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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.
Do we? I thought maybe they were exactly equal, and there'd been a huge bang when matter and antimatter annihilated themselves and we were a tiny local cluster of matter bits which got missed.
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Common sense? You can't apply your meatbrain savanna instincts to cosmic scale problems such as the composition of the universe. To quote Terry Pratchett's grim reaper, "YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS"
You've not strayed from current physics knowledge here, but your reason for supporting sounds kind of flimsy.
On the other side of the Universe.... (Score:3, Funny)
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puoS krauQ
Qapla'!
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New Daily Special at Quarks Bar: DS9 (Score:1)
Can this thing make "strangelets"? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:Can this thing make "strangelets"? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [newscientist.com]
This doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
Energies at the Large Hadron Collider are likely to peak at 14 teraelectronvolts
breaks down at the quantum level. This energy is in the order of 1018 gigaelectronvolts
100 trillion times more energetic than the LHC
If I convert all those frighteningly big numbers to scientific notation, I get:
The parent is saying that the LHC puts out about 10x as much energy as that at which we lose all idea of what's happening. He's also saying that 1.02 e 12 is 100 trillion times 1.4 E 13. Something is not right here. Anyone care to set him/me/us straight?
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There are those who believe that if these accelerators ever do create the exotic matter we are looking for the universe will instantly be replaced by something strange and inexplicable.
There are those who believe this has already happened.
Pedantic (Score:2)
"four trillion degrees Celsius"
When you're talking "trillions," there's really not much difference between degrees Celsius and kelvins. And all "four trillion degrees Celsius" means to the layman is "really fucking hot."
So... why not just "4 terakelvins?" Or is it exakelvins?
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As you point out, anyone who knows what a Kelvin is can easily do an accurate enough conversion. If the article did use Kelvin then everybody who doesn't know what a Kelvin is would be lost. Is that really hot? Cold? In the middle?
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Well sure but it's a lot easier to say 4 trillion Celsius than "Four trillion two hundred seventy three point one five degrees Kelvin."
Too Many Kevins (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Pedantic (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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The conversion from temperature units to energy is generally understood. Multiply by Boltzmann's constant to convert from temperature to energy. Temperature can be thought of as 1/2 the average energy in any degree of freedom of a system. Therefore, it SHOULD have units of energy. But we didn't understand the relationship between temperature and energy in the old days, so now we have a unit conversion between them.
(Another way of defining temperature is the rate of change of energy per entropy, and should s
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oops. Twice the average energy, not half.
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Electron volts are a unit of energy, not temperature. Those two are different physical quantities. For example, a test tube of liquid and a bathtub of liquid can both be the same temperature, but the bathtub holds more heat energy just because its mass is larger.
A very tiny unit of energy, the energy required to move 1 electron across a potential difference of 1 volt. Think of how many teraelectron-volts there are in a sneeze.
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I find it baffling that you'd pick up on the (microscopic) difference between Celsius and Kelvin - but ignore the utterly meaningless term "trillion". Nobody in the sciences uses that word since it may or may not imply 9 or 12 or 15 (or whatever) zeros, depending on which part of the globe you happen you stand on.
Oh, and 0.4GeV is nothing - the cosmic-ray spectrum peaks around 1GeV and cosmic-ray events have been observed another 11 orders of magnitude beyond that. Google term: "Fly's Eye".
Old news (Score:3, Funny)
And religious conservatives (Score:2)
thought biomedical researchers were "playing God".
Devil's advocate (Score:2)
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but have rational scientists even asked the question?
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> I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but have rational scientists even asked the question?
No, nobody has ever considered the safety. Since you are so brilliant and have just thought of it by yourself, you should quickly write them a letter and tell them. I'm sure they'll be appreciative.
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Fear is the enemy of innovation and knowledge.
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"recreating conditions at the beginning of the universe"
We've been doing that for quite a while now, 50 years ago we were playing around with the conditions that occurred a few seconds after creation, now we've turned to clock back to a few microseconds after creation, so they been asking the question for a while; but when they build one around the equator, I'm going to start worrying.
Symmetry violations? (Score:2)
"quark-gluon soup?" (Score:2)
Better to search for "quark-gluon plasma" if you are looking for more info on this subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma [wikipedia.org]
Quark-gluon plasma (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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>>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.
If mass really exists, which it may or may not.
In general relativity, the concept of mass is kind of a vague one. Momentum is a lot easier to work with. Photons have momentum but no mass. What most people think of as "mass" means something along the lines
the paper (Score:2)
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'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.
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Imagine if two cars crashed together and their symmetry suddenly changed from bilateral to radial.
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You see, cars are actually made up of smaller pieces (I know, right? Science has advanced so far). But the funny thing is that you can take these "car parts" apart and get even more, smaller parts, especially when you use force. But the smaller the pieces get, the more we begin to wonder how it all ended up making a car in the first place.
That's why they're throwing really tiny minced-up bits of car at each other at really high speeds to see what happens.
Yeah, no, that analogy breaks down pretty quickly.
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A sort of light speed for heat? Interesting idea... Where are the armchair physicists when you need them?
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Uh, following your argument, since there is a maximum speed a particle can only reach tangentially (the speed of light), so if motion = temperature, there has to be a maximum temperature as well.
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alright, now I get what you were trying to say :)
However, since temperature is a property of mass, there isn't much to discuss there.
Re:Relativism (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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That depends on which definition of temperature you use. In thermodynamics, absolute hot would be negative 0 Kelvin. Absolute hot only exists for systems with limited number of energy states. When you add more energy, eventually you start to fill up the energy states and you can't add more energy. In this case, the temperature scale is pretty weird. Negative values of temperature are hotter (contain higher energy) than positive temperatures. When the system is at minimum energy, you are near absolute 0, the
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Some space quantization theories purport that there is a limit on energy density of the universe, but I don't think any of these are mainstream.
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Yeah, sort of. Actually, thermodynamics and information theory are utterly entwined.
Re:what a surprise, we need more money (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:what a surprise, we need more money (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't it cute when idiots try to act all clever?
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Not really, no.
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Rule of Acquisition #265: NO SOUP FOR YOU!