英语翻译及上课感想.docVIP

Why Does Quark Matter Matter? The history of modern technological development can be viewed as a series of investigations, with ever increasing resolution, into the microscopic structure of matter. Since the days of the early Greek philosophers, science has been on a continual quest to find the smallest piece — the most fundamental building block — forming the substance of the universe. During that journey, many beautiful and exotic properties of the subatomic world have been discovered: particles with wave-like properties the ultimate position of which can never be known; “particles” of light that deliver a fixed amount of energy when they strike the atoms of a material’s surface; particles in some types of electrical conductors that pair in a unique way because of intrinsic “spin” so that, below a certain temperature, all resistance goes to zero. Knowledge of these and many other properties discovered in the last century in the process of studying matter at ever smaller scales lets us use matter and energy in ways too fantastic to imagine just 50 years ago. Todays technology relies on a basic understanding of the structure and properties of matter. School children work on personal computers based upon state-of-the-art electronics. Diseases are imaged, diagnosed, and treated without surgery. And people can speak clearly to others around the world using a phone smaller than a human hand. RHIC is designed to extend this frontier, providing access to the most fundamental building blocks of nature known so far — quarks and gluons. By colliding the nuclei of gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light, RHIC heats the matter in collision to more than a billion times the temperature of the sun. In so doing, scientists are able to study the fundamental properties of the basic building blocks of matter and learn how they behaved 15 to 20 billion years ago, when the universe was barely a split-second old. Scientists have a theory, c