rationalskepticism.org

socratus wrote:

newolder wrote:FFS! Someone get that woman the computer she wants!
Much cheaper than an election cycle.

Quarks and gluons cannot be taken out of proton and therefore
all calculations by supercomputer is a child game of big scientists.

Heavy ions and quark-gluon plasma

CERN physicists collide heavy ions to free quarks - recreating conditions that existed in the universe just after the Big Bang

For a few millionths of a second, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with an astonishingly hot, dense soup made of all kinds of particles moving at near light speed. This mixture was dominated by quarks – fundamental bits of matter – and by gluons, carriers of the strong force that normally “glue” quarks together into familiar protons and neutrons and other species. In those first evanescent moments of extreme temperature, however, quarks and gluons were bound only weakly, free to move on their own in what’s called a quark-gluon plasma.

To recreate conditions similar to those of the very early universe, powerful accelerators make head-on collisions between massive ions, such as gold or lead nuclei. In these heavy-ion collisions the hundreds of protons and neutrons in two such nuclei smash into one another at energies of upwards of a few trillion electronvolts each. This forms a miniscule fireball in which everything “melts” into a quark-gluon plasma.

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