UNEXPECTEDLY? CAN'T THEY READ?:

In the beginning was ... a perfect liquid?: ‘Big Bang soup’ really behaves like fluid, scientists say (Reuters, April 18, 2005)

Scientists using a giant atom smasher said on Monday they have created a new state of matter — a hot, dense liquid made out of basic atomic particles — and said it shows what the early universe looked like for a very, very brief time.

For a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang that scientists say gave rise to the universe, all matter was in the form of this liquid, called a quark-gluon plasma, the researchers said.

"We have a new state of matter," said Sam Aronson, associate laboratory director for high-energy and nuclear physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"We think we are looking at a phenomenon ... in the universe 13 billion years ago when free quarks and gluons ... cooled down to the particles that we know today," Aronson told a news conference carried by telephone from a meeting of the American Physical Society in Tampa, Fla.

The quark-gluon plasma was made in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider — a powerful atom smasher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. Unexpectedly, the quark-gluon plasma behaved like a perfect liquid of quarks, instead of a gas, the physicists said.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 18, 2005 4:39 PM