Quark soup

No, not a new Marx Brothers movie, but the possible result of the collision of two gold nuclei at 99.995% of the speed of light.

...physicists claim that at this temperature nuclear material melts into an exotic form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma – thought to have been the state of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang. Recreating this primordial soup is the primary purpose of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After five years of data, it appears as if RHIC may have succeeded. But a big mystery looms over the detection: the putative plasma explodes more violently than predicted.

But then again, science gets fun when the experiment decides not to match the prediction. That's the kind of thing that results in Nobel prizes.

Some of the weirdnesses include:

Cramer and his colleagues have another alternative explanation, too: perhaps the explosion is not as explosive as the data suggests. ... One of the reasons for this conservative approach has to do with how fast the supposed plasma appears to freeze back into ordinary matter. Theory assumed this phase transition would take almost twice as long as was measured.

I wonder if one of the things that's happening is that space is expanding in the volume where this plasma is created. This would cause the plasma to cool off more quickly, and to spread out into surrounding space more explosively, but without as much energy showing up in the fragments as might otherwise be the case.

Just a thought...