IS IT PRIMORDIAL SOUP YET? (6-2003)

Remember your high school chemistry class? You learned that 
everything is made up of atoms and you learned that atoms, 
in turn, are made out of things called protons, neutrons, 
and electrons. Protons and neutrons live in the nucleus of 
an atom and electrons buzz around the perimeter.

Some students love science; others hate it. Whether or not 
someone loves or hates science depends on a number of 
factors, including how interesting the teacher makes it and 
whether the student is “right brained” or “left brained.” A 
left brained person generally tends to be more analytical, 
whereas a right brained individual gravitates toward the 
arts or literature.

Still, the sheer mind-blowing tendency of some scientific 
discoveries, especially in the field of physics, makes it 
difficult to understand how anyone could find science 
boring.

Take, for example, last week’s announcement by physicists 
working at Brookhaven National Laboratory that they had 
possibly manufactured in the lab the “primordial soup” that 
existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, which 
was the beginning of the universe.

Theorists estimate that during the first thousandth of a 
second after the Big Bang, the universe was a hot place, 
some 100 trillion degrees, although it was probably a dry 
heat. In the intervening 13 billion years, it has cooled 
down considerably, to only about three degrees Kelvin. 
That’s three degrees above absolute zero, or about 450 
degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.

But now, scientists have managed to heat things back up 
again using a special particle accelerator that crashes 
gold atoms into each other with great force. The particle 
accelerator speeds atoms up to almost the speed of light 
and smashes them into each other. The resulting debris 
field is composed of the most basic of particles called 
quarks and gluons. Gluons are the particles that “glue” 
quarks together to form the protons and neutrons from which 
atoms are made.

This debris field produced from the violent atomic 
collisions is very dense and is at a temperature unheard of 
in nature since the universe initially cooled down below 
about a trillion degrees, less than a second after the Big 
Bang.

Although the experiment must be analyzed further, and 
confirmed by other scientists, the researchers have strong 
evidence that they have created the “quark-gluon plasma” 
that existed in the primordial universe of 13 billion years 
ago.

What the scientists are doing may be esoteric, but it’s 
anything but boring. It reminds us that everything we 
touch, including each other, is composed of particles so 
tiny that no one has ever seen a single one, and that these 
particles are themselves composed of even smaller particles 
that have not existed outside their present “homes” for 
some 13 billion years.

We live in a fascinating world. Science is what helps us to 
understand how it works.