Particle physicists are on the brink of a fabulous new discovery about the birth of the universe. There's just one catch: They're not sure what it is. It could be the same discovery they've sought for two decades -- an eerie entity called the "quark-gluon plasma," the hypothetical mother of all cosmic matter. Or it could be something radically different, something so strange they can't even precisely define it. The confusion stems from experiments on the eastern edge of Long Island, at an "atom smasher" big enough to be seen from outer space. There, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, physicists collide gold ions traveling at almost the speed of light. The resulting collisions briefly generate a temperature hundreds of millions of times higher than the surface of the sun. In that flash of primordial heat, they hope to reproduce the conditions that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe in the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago.

Within this "Little Bang," as some call it, the fierce heat, extreme density and unbelievable pressure -- akin to more than 100 sun-size stars resting on your fingernail -- should "melt" ordinary matter into its primal building blocks: quarks and the particles that bind them, gluons.


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