Matter Created At 4,000,000,000,000 Degrees Celsius
Right now, the Large Hadron Collider’s running at half power, which means that Brookhaven National Labs’ Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider’s the biggest of the huge particle smashing machines. And on Monday, they revealed that they’d created the smashiest particle of all time – a quark-gluon plasma that reached four trillion degrees celsius.
The plasma A) recreated the conditions of the big bang, B) broke the laws of physics and C) was really, really hot. Seriously, a scientist tried to touch it and was like, “ow!” and immediately sucked on his finger, which had been transported to another dimension.
Seriously, though: this thing broke the laws of physics. It created a bubble in which particles lost their left or right spin direction, which is like you going from gay to straight for no good reason. A particle’s spin direction dictates both its behavior and how many chemical compounds react to that particle. This is leading scientists to now think that the laws of physics might be relative to temperature – a.k.a., if it’s hot enough, the laws of physics become mere “guidelines of physics.” That’s insane!
Four trillion degrees celsius. Can you imagine how many degrees that is in fahrenheit, the one, true temperature measurement? Imagine no longer: it’s 7.2 trillion degrees fahrenheit. Holy moly.
