Re:Another reason the SSC shouldn't have died. (Score 1)

We could have probably done this a few years ago if the SSC in Texas(?) hadn't been axed by Congress....but NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Sorry. A quark-gluon plasma would not have been created at the SSC. The SSC was designed for detecting the Higgs boson, which is another animal alltogether.

Quark-gluon plasmas are created in regimes which are both high temperature and quark rich, like the environments produced at SPS (CERN) and RHIC (Brookhaven). High temperature environments are produced wherever you put enough energy into a system. The SSC would have qualified for a high temperature environment. However, there just aren't enough quarks in two protons (6) to get a high quark environment. The SPS experiment smashed lead onto lead to get more than 1200 quarks into play. This was apparently enough quarks to get a bulk effect like a plasma to sustain for a short time.

--The Yendi