Particle Collider Experiment Recreates the Big Bang's Primordial Soup - and Finds Unexpected Pattern

“Physicists smashed gold nuclei together at nearly the speed of light and found an unexpected pattern in the particles…” writes Live Science. “If confirmed, that pattern could help reveal how the hot soup of quarks and gluons that filled the universe in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang cooled and condensed into the protons and neutrons that make up ordinary matter today.” In every collision, particles are flung out sideways; how hard they are flung, on average, varies slightly from one collision to the next. Physicists expected the size of these variations to change smoothly as