Blog 4: Physicists See Similarities In Stream Of Sand Grains, Exotic Plasma At Birth Of Universe

In an article written on November 7, 2007, there was a new insight into the birth of the universe explained. These finding were initially reported in the Physical Review Letters by a team from the University of Chicago. The team, led by Sidney Nagel and Heinrich Jaeger, discovered that in their simple experiment, they found that granular particles bouncing off a target produced behavior that was similar to behavior being researched to simulate the beginning of the universe. The experiment was designed to explore the depths of physical properties in which the situation has been pushed beyond the state of equilibrium; which in this case was a jet of sand. The attempt was to answer: in what kind of conditions does a collection of molecules, sand grains or other particles behave like a liquid? The article explained that after experiment, the team found that “rapid collisions of densely packed particles produce the liquid state that we can see afterward, when everything flies apart”. The intriguing part came when compared with quark-gluon plasma experiments being conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. There were a number of similarities found between the two experiments which were surprising because it was expected that quantum physics would dominate in the Ion Collider.

The reason I found this article to be intriguing was summed up in the article in a quote by Nagel stating, “that’s the amazing thing about physics. The laws you have at one level really are the same as at other levels… certain principles are just invariant. Conservation of energy and momentum- you can’t get away from these on any scale.” Even though this article was based mostly on physics, it shows that because there were such similarities to what is perceived to have occurred millionths of a second after the big bang, the only way to truly further science is to combine the disciplines together. Astronomers have been around for thousands of years, but the only hope for one day truly understanding the universe is to be able to understand other studies such as physics, chemistry etc.

University of Chicago (2007, November 7). Physicists See Similarities In Stream Of Sand Grains, Exotic Plasma At Birth Of Universe. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 13, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2007/11/071106164740.htm