hot enough to fry an egg

Computer generated version of a quark-gluon plasma

Despite the reference to eggs, this has nothing to do with food. Eggs no; hot yes. Some fellow human beings have achieved and measured a quark-gluon plasma at 4-trillion degrees Celsius. In case you can't fathom that, imagine 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Protons and elections would simply melt.

If that isn't wild enough to fry your brain, what gets me is the speeds they get these gold nuclei circling around their handy Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. They collide these invisible-to-the-eye gold specks after accelerating their speed to 99.995 percent the speed of light.

You can do the math, right. One lap of this underground track is 2.4 miles. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, I think. So in one second, this gold speck goes around that track 77,500 times. In ONE SECOND.

If we can do stuff like that, we should be able to figure out how to end hunger.

Do you think we can?

Comments

[Kel]

It's too bad politicians don't behave as predictably as protons and electrons. If that were the case, they might listen to their constituents more than their donors, and we'd have some lasting change.