One would feel more confident that these little buggers can't swallow reality if the physicist's predictions were actually reliable. Alas, the scientific results appear to be somewhat surprising. While delightful, this does weaken the researcher's reputation as reliable prognosticators.
I like my title better than that of the New York Times.
The bits and pieces flying out from the high-speed collisions of gold nuclei at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island have not been behaving quite as physicists had expected...Update: Yes, a superfluid.
...In a normal black hole, the energy comes back out as photons, particles of light, what is called Hawking radiation. In a strong force mini-black hole, the radiation would come out as particles known as pions. Because of the differences between gravity and the strong force, a strong force black hole would inevitably fall apart, Dr. Nastase said...
... The collisions of gold nuclei produce matter as it existed shortly after the Big Bang. In the everyday universe, protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei are made of smaller particles known as quarks that are held together by the strong force, and because the strong force is so strong, it is ordinarily impossible to pull out a single quark...
... physicists expected that at ultrahot temperatures the bindings holding the quarks together would loosen and dissolve into a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma...
... Five years later, however, physicists are still holding off from claiming they have made a quark-gluon plasma. That is in part because the result of the collisions looks more like a liquid than a gaseous plasma...
... The scientists working on the experiment hope to figure out by summer a more definitive answer of what they actually produced at RHIC.
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