USA Today, Reuters, NYTimes etc: Brookhaven physicists amazed as lightspeed gold goes bang, bigtime.
One can’t be too surprised that if one zips gold ions to just a hair under the speed of light and smacks them into one another head on, out will come something to put in the journals of science. After physicists at Brookhaven National Lab described the results yesterday at a meeting in DC of the American Physical Society (also in Physical Review Letters), however, reporters could not agree on what part is the most amazing.
Some liked the temperature, hot enough to melt protons and neutrons. It is inferred from the debris as reaching – for fleeting instants in tiny regions of the collision zone – 7.2 trillion degrees or about 250,000 times hotter than the Sun’s fusion core. USA Today‘s Dan Vergano called the result the hottest thing since the Big Bang. Over at MSNBC and his Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle calls the flashes of dismembered quark-gluon plasma matter the “hottest dollops of soup ever seen in the universe” and works in Big Bang references too. Soup seems a good metaphor – the cloud of stuff that forms – and dissipates almost instantly – appears to behave more like a liquid than a gas, it says here.
Others bit on notions of illegal physics. At the NYTimes Dennis Overbye maybe stretches things in making his point, which is that the material violated parity. That means it seems to favor left-handed motions over right-handed ones. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way defies the usual dictum that nature should work symmetrically, or the same way when viewed in a mirror as when looked at straight on. Overbye’s lede say it thus was able “to briefly distort the laws of physics.” The hed is more emphatic: “..Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature.” Hmm. More like the test rewrote a law that mere humans previously inferred incompletely, or perhaps it would best described as discovery of a loophole. That’s the thing about loopholes – they may violate the spirit of the law, they may be unfair, but they are legal.
There are other variations in coverage that implied a particularly feline-behavior (running in disparate directions) during an opportunity for herd journalism. That’d be great if this were an instant of reporters listening to the pitch and making up their own minds, and in different ways, about what is the news here. Ah, but the diversity was partly handed to the media. It turns out Brookhaven’s web site sports two press releases, linked down below in Grist. Each tackles a different way by which the experiment raised the researchers’ pulses.
That’s okay. Not many of us could chew on, digest, metabolize, and excrete original angles we thought up all by ourselves on a story like this in just a few hours and on a topic so arcane – not with much confidence anyway. I couldn’t. But somebody could – scroll down to the New Scientist bullet.
Other Stories:
- Reuters – Maggie Fox: Hottest Temperature Ever Heads Science to Big Bang; Ms. Fox offers spintronics as a possible practical application. Perhaps so. It doesn’t say how, though.
- Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire : Scientists create hottest temperature since Big Bang – 250,000 times more scorching than our Sun.
- Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Scientists cook up hottest ‘soup’ ever ;
- Science News – Laura Sanders: Hot and heavy matter runs a 4 trillion degree fever / Hot quark-gluon soup cooked up in collisions of gold atoms ;
- Science A Go Go – Kate Melville: Mirror symmetry broken at 7 trillion degrees ; Nice hed – two angles.
- New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Atom smasher shows vacuum of space in a twist ; Cool in two ways. Ms. Courtland writes the story with a fresh angle – jumping right into quantum chromodynamics and the matter-energy equivalance. She or a copy editor also put the right term in the hed, atom smasher, so old-fashioned but in this case just right.
- Discover Magazine – Calla Cofield: The hottest science experiment on the planet ; Cofield shows a good sense of perspective here – explaining why this hot spot can’t melt a hole in the Earth, and why it is tough to separate data’s signal from the chaff during such tests.
Grist for the Mill:
Brookhaven Nat’l Lab Press Release by title:
1) “Bubbles” of Broken Symmetry in Quark Soup at RHIC ; 2) “Perfect” Liquid Hot Enough to be Quark Soup ;
- Charlie Petit
