Scientist discover new form of matter!

[Jackal hit]

oh btw, i don't think even a collapsed star has enough energy to overcome the strong nuclear force and convert the nuclei into free quarks.. that'd only happen as the electroweak force (a unified force itself) unifies with the strong nuclear force, afaik.. those forces underwent symmetry breaking like a few millionths of seconds after the big bang..

maybe in an actively collapsing star you could get free quarks for a period of time, but they'd surely revert to grouped quarks. oh and mr. chimp metioned somthing about quantum mechanics being random. that's not quite right. it's that the underlying principles in QM are about statistical probabilties, not absolutes. it's not random, just "fuzzy", but all within the framework of likelihoods. but i don't know enough about QM to know whether or not it's impossible for a particle to be cooled (or created at) < 0 K, or just improbable.

just improbable. nothing in physics is impossible, there's actually a quantum probability that a ball at rest can randomly move uphill. also it's more that two sets of realities(or more) exist at once, and our observations of them determine what is happening at that moment that we observe them. (this is where we get that "randomness" idea from)

 

[Jackal hit]

also, i think physicists should agree on a definition of energy, then they can start talking about positive and negative energy.

and with the absolute zero thing. i don't know much about it, but if mass stops vibrating, it's possible that matter would decouple entirely. think about it, on the most basic level, mass vibrates because the strings making up the quarks vibrate. each of the 3 quarks making up protons and neutrons(and other "heavy" sub atomic particles) all vibrate. so going back, the strings would cease to vibrate. what happens then? shouldn't binding energy cease, and the electro-weak and strong forces (all three of those are unified in quantum theory, so maybe any QM people here could answer this more adeptly than has been done on the thread... which is to say not at all?) cease as well? (yes i'm aware that string theory is not supported by QM, but QM is supported by M-theory.) so what happens when a string stops vibrating? could that be negative energy? it COULD be. what else... i was gonna say something about higher dimensions that someone had a misconception on, but now i'm too damned tired to search again so i'll leave it at this. blah.
*dies* :x

edit: also, just remembered. masky is totally correct about michio kaku. check out his books "Hyperspace," "Beyond Einstein," and ... uhhh... "Visions" great reads. he's similar to carl sagan in his ability to define very advanced concepts in a simple way so everyone can understand.

oh and i was gonna say also... someone mentioned something about a force, blah don't remember everything, but as you go into higher dimensions, "forces" cease to be forces, and more just effects of an interaction in a higher dimension. (imagine a shadow cast on a piece of paper that is changing, the paper person would view some odd force to make the shadow bend and warp and stuff... go one dimension higher, it's only you, holding an object and rotating it ... this is explained much more clearly in "Hyperspace".... also, think of this as a hypercube, the cube within the cube drawing isn't what a hypercube would look like... that's it's "Shadow".)
*dies*:x

edit2: okay i'm not even sure any of this made ANY sense... i'm too tired to reread it. so please excuse... any schizophrenia style random syntax lol

 

[Brian Damage]

Hey, has anyone here heard about The Great Attractor? That's supposed to be something called a Cosmic String...

 

[Fat Tony!]

Ha and i thought a/s level physics was relativly hard

 

[Jackal hit]

Hey, has anyone here heard about The Great Attractor? That's supposed to be something called a Cosmic String...

hmm i think i i've heard that before. i've often wondered while sitting in one of my cosmology classes, if, in the universe's accelerating expansion... what if everything is expanding to a single place, so it's almost like it's being all pulled to one place with ultra high gravity. this "great attractor" thing sounds interesting, i'll have to read about it.

 

[theneb]

Here's a good article over at Physicsweb: http://physicsweb.org/article/news/8/1/14