Physics are great, partly because I’ve never understood anything related to physics that is more complex than a car covering a specific distance per hour. However, today I stumbled across an article by Dariusz Miskowiec who shows “that the concept of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter consisting of uncorrelated quarks, and gluons, has a fundamental problem”, whereas he claims that he’ll base his explanation on “simple physics arguments”. Cool, I thought. He’s got my attention.
A quark-gluon plasma (QGP) forms when the density or temperature of hadrons (particles consisting of quarks) exceeds a certain level, for example by heating. A QGP is believed to be in the inside of neutron stars and to have been the biggest part of all matter that was around in the initial moment after the big bang. Dariusz Miskowiec doesn’t explain this in his paper, which is not necessary, by the way, because we all know it already, don’t we? Instead he wants you to make a gedanken experiment (the Germans, they have a word for everything) by imagining one cubic mm of QGP with a temperature “well above the critical temperature” that is stretched to dimensions of 10 fm x 10 fm x 1,000 light years. If you then connect both ends you have a GQP ring with a diameter of 1,000 light years. So far, so good.
If you now cut the ring at one point the hadronization would start at the two loose ends (the plasma would create hadrons). This would go on into both directions of the ring, until the ring would disappear. Now, this hasn’t been anything extremely interesting yet, but I know your next question: What will happen if you cut the ring at two different points (but at the same time)? The two ends would be seperated by a distance of light years, of course. The plasma would hadronize again, but only until the rest of the ring would have a non-neutral color charge! Honestly, I can’t tell you what this means, but it sounds like a hell lot of fun, because we started from a physically allowed state, always abided by physics laws, but we ended up with something that is forbidden.
Up to this point in the article I realized something: The explanation is in no way based on “simple” physics arguments… I don’t even understand the problem Mr. Miskowiec is talking about. After all, I decided that the world would be better off without me writing about the quark-gluon plasma paradox (although I love paradoxes, no kidding) and that a better way of getting you interested in the QGP paradox is a link, which follows below. Enjoy.
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