Friday, March 05, 2010

Physicists create "negatively-strange antihypermatter"

Someday in our foreseeable future, our children will be learning about chemistry with a periodic table that looks something like this...

...no thanks to researchers conducting experiments with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

According to this article at The Register (which reads disturbingly too much like a quantum physics essay written by Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange) the "topflight international reverse-alchemy boffins say they have managed to transmute gold into an entirely new form of 'negatively strange' antihypernucleic antimatter, ultra-bizarre stuff which cannot possibly occur naturally - except perhaps inside the cores of collapsed stars."

In layman's terms it's a new form of matter whose strangeness is less than zero but probably not too boring.

I'm currently hopped-up on allergy medicine, and I still have no idea what the hell all of that means.

0 comments:

Post a Comment