My friend Kyle, passed along an interesting article in USA Today (April 20, 2005): “Picking apart the ‘Big Bang’ brings a big mystery.”
“From colliding atoms: Instead of a hot gas of independent particles, top, experiments generated a ‘perfect’ liquid of linked particles” (USA Today). These images contrast the degree of interaction and collective motion, or “flow,” among quarks in the predicted gaseous quark-gluon plasma state (Figure A, see mpeg animation) vs. the liquid state that has been observed in gold-gold collisions at RHIC (Figure B, see mpeg animation). The green “force lines” and collective motion (visible on the animated version only) show the much higher degree of interaction and flow among the quarks in what is now being described as a nearly “perfect” liquid.
Yet another finding expanding our understanding of the interconnectedness of life, and it even is using Scale-Free Network graphing to illustrate its findings.
For more see:
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- BNL Report: “Hunting the Quark Gluon Plasma” (PDF), Results From the First Three Years at RHIC
- Experimental evaluation by the PHENIX collaboration
- The STAR Collaboration’s Critical Assessment of the Evidence from RHIC Collisions
- The PHOBOS perspective on discoveries at RHIC
- The perspective from the BRAHMS experiment
Peace, dwight
