Article: The Big Bang Is Back: A high-powered physics experiment promises to turn back the clock to a microsecond after the birth of the universe.(Science and Technology)(Brief Article)

This is probably not the way the world ends: sometime this fall, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory will tap a few commands into a computer terminal, bringing their new particle accelerator--the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC--up to full power. Atoms of gold--heavy enough to cause some real quantum fireworks--will course around two nearly circular, 2.4-mile "racetracks" in opposite directions at 99.9 percent of the speed of light. The nuclei will smash into each other, exploding at a temperature 10,000 times hotter than at the center of the sun. For a hundred trillionths of a trillionth of a second, conditions will mirror the universe immediately after ...

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