As any student of high school physics will tell you, physics is great fun because you get to
crash various objects into one another and get credit for it. Of course, there is a catch. One
cannot crash carts with impunity. No sir, if you're going to smash objects together and claim
some kind of scientific justification, you must be able to explain the outcome of the collision
in mathematical terms.
This image represents an attempt by scientists to predict what will happen when two gold ions are smashed into one another at nearly the speed of light using a particle accelerator (the sexy term is "atom smasher"). Gold ions are particularly interesting because they are quite large--197 protons versus the single proton found in hydrogen. By smashing very large ions together, theorists expect that extraordinary heat will be generated--enough heat to temporarily produce a kind of plasma that has been unknown since the Big Bang. If their predictions prove correct, scientists hope to learn a great deal about the forces that helped form the universe.
Conveniently enough, this image is color coded in order to better show what will take place during the collision. The gray dots are sub-atom particles called "quarks," and the green ones are called "gluons." The plentiful red dots show clusters of gluons and quarks that will be created by the powerful energy created when nuclei pass through one another. Finally, these clusters are expected to break apart and form pions (blue), kaons (yellow), and other particles that will likely interact and decay.
It occurs to us that the last paragraph illustrates one of the other fun aspects of doing physics (well, sub-atom physics, anyway)--the opportunity to give humorous names to tiny sub-atomic particles.
Image courtesy The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
