I really appreciate the “includes paid promotion” notation at the beginning of this video. It annoys me that, more and more, people are turning their channels into paid product endorsements. I guess I don’t really mind that they’re able to get money and free stuff, I appreciate that Youtube is making it clear and out in the open.
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How would that even work? Pulling two quarks apart takes more mass-energy than it does to make a couple of new quarks!
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His previous collaboration with an insurance company was also good
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Yeah, the way he went in and grabbed it had me all “that’s definitely not what Lauri would do.”
He’s a smart guy. He uses a blast shield. He waits till things are inert.
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On the one hand, negative matter is almost certainly an impossibility. But if not, its mass should cancel out equal quantities of positive mass it comes into contact with. But since quantum field theory only allows certain particles to exist and those only as a whole (you can’t take an arbitrary bite out of a hadron like you could an apple), all transitions would have to be discreet, not continuous. If the negative mass of the negative matter could intercept the positive mass of the plate’s subatomic particles, the hadrons in the atomic nucleus should in essence fall apart and reform instantly (or rather before it’s possible in principle to observe the deconfined quarks). This process occurs all the time during natural and artificial nuclear reactions. But the products wouldn’t be a clear pathway like a nuclear reaction. It would more closely resemble the shower of new particles produced in the LHC, but on a scale orders of magnitude larger.
But as I said, negative matter is probably impossible and, although there are examples of negative mass in nature, it’s unlikely they’re ever in a form that can cancel out solid matter. Would make a hell of a YouTube video though 
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You skipped a few of my grades here.
This is basically how I understand deconfinement to end up working:
If I’m wrong here, then let me know, but you still haven’t really told me how deconfined quarks can exist… I guess maybe if there’s just only enough energy around to make one quark happen, or maybe two, very close to the event horizon of a black hole you might get single quarks, but I still don’t really know what’d happen if a single quark existed deconfined.
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One quark would never be created in isolation (the exception to this is virtual quarks, but they can never be directly observed). The deconfinement of two or more quarks requires a minimum energy needed to create an equal number of quarks. So if one quark in a pair gets pulled into a black hole and the other escapes, the black hole loses exactly as much energy as is needed to give the escaping quark a new companion. So quark deconfinement is by definition quark creation. As your very cool gif points out, puling quarks apart is like pulling apart a rubber band, except that the energy needed to break the rubber band leaves you with two new rubber bands in its place instead of two rubber band halves.
But in a scenario with enough energy, it’s in theory possible to create what’s known as a quark-gluon plasma. Again, you will likely never directly observe quark state matter directly. The quarks are what is sometimes referred to as asymptotically free. As it immediately cools, it undergoes a phase change and all deconfined quarks join into pairs or trios or, theoretically, even more complicated quark structures. This is a gross oversimplification, but you can think of it as a momentary condition where the energy density is so high that the quarks have trouble forming bonds, because they’re so “hot” that their motion immediately pulls them apart.
This of course can’t last long, but it’s thought that it plays a role in current best models of the early universe. It may also be possible to duplicate it briefly in particle accelerators. Even though the quark matter itself can’t be directly observed, it can be indirectly observed by it’s products. If you think of a normal nuclear reaction as a nice clean orderly rearrangement of quarks, QGP is more like an internal combustion engine, where heat jumbles things up and all sorts of exotic crap comes out.
Hope that helps. Definitely stealing that GIF 
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