Editorial
Random Babblings from a Confused Physicist-in-Training
[DISCLAIMER: This editorial should not be used a scientifically-credible source. The author has taken little effort to verify the truth of the statements contained within it. Read at your own risk.]
So, if I remember correctly, shortly after the Big Bang happened (I can’t seem to describe it using any word other than “happened”), there was this thing called the quark-gluon plasma, which constituted all of the matter in the universe. A fraction of a second later, it was gone, having turned into hadrons (mesons and baryons; i.e. quark-containing particles, like your average protons, neutrons, pions, kaons, etc.). The evolution of the universe could be described as a series of coalescences. You have your quark-gluon plasma first, and then the individual quarks and gluons coalesce to form hadrons, and then the hadrons coalesce to form nuclei, and nuclei coalesce to form... uh... neutronium. Giant mass of really really really really dense über-stuff. You know, the junk that makes up neutron stars.
But the point is, I digress. Though neutronium can be formed by the coalescence of nuclei, you can also throw in a bunch of leptons (non quark-based particles like electrons, muons, neutrinos, etc.) and make.... atoms! And those atoms can coalesce into... polymers! And those polymers can coalesce (through condensation polymerization) into ... ONE GIANT MOLECULE!!! All the matter in the universe combines into ... ONE GIANT MOLECULE! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Uh... well... maybe not quite, but you get the idea.
So anyway, as I was saying before my editorial got out of my control, the quark-gluon plasma was the state of matter right after the Big Bang happened. I don’t think I actually described it yet, so I will now. It’s this “soup” (the popular term, I believe) of quarks and gluons, lots of particles oozing around without any regard to forming clearly-defined hadrons (three quarks in a baryon, a quark and an antiquark in a meson). But if it’s soup, I wonder if it’s edible... Is it USDA-inspected and approved? Hmmm...
Reminds me of a story I wrote a while back called “Quantum Soup.” Only the title has any similarity though; the story has nothing to do with the quark-gluon plasma. It should, I hope, be included in this issue as well, but if not ... uh ... then that’s pretty bewildering, I guess.
But I digress again. What I was going to say was, this quark-gluon plasma, or GDP, is a pretty hot topic in particle physics these days. In fact... Oh, wait, that’s QGP, not GDP. My apologies. Gross domestic product, what was I thinking? So... where was I? Oh, yes. The quark-gluon plasma. The folks at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory are running a few experiments to simulate conditions shortly after the Big Bang. And they’re doing it in reverse. They’re taking gold nuclei and smashing them together at really high speeds. The nuclei break apart when they smash into each other, sending hadrons flying. The hadrons themselves collide, and they too break apart into quarks and gluons. And for a brief instant, we have ... the quark-gluon plasma.
We can’t actually detect the quark-gluon plasma itself, but we can observe it by looking at what it turns into after it recombines into hadrons. It shoots off all sorts of particles, and many of them can be detected and analyzed to figure out what’s going on with the quark-gluon plasma.
However, at this point, I am confusing myself. I no longer have any idea what I’m talking about. Perhaps I should discuss something else in the next installment of this editorial series. In fact, I definitely should. It’s the sign of a lazy writer to copy and paste the same editorial to make a new one. And so, I conclude this first installment of “Random Babblings from a Confused Physicist-in-Training.” Until next week... um... I don’t know if this is going to be weekly or not... hmm... excuse me, until next time, I say to you all, have fun and always wear a lifejacket when swimming in the quantum soup.
Copyright © 2003 by The Invincible Spud