How to Make Quark Soup

You don’t need a time machine to marvel at the hot broth of quarks and gluons that made up all matter in the microsecond after the Big Bang—you just need a ticket on the Long Island Railroad. Through massive feats of engineering, Brookhaven National Laboratory has devised a recipe for cooking up tiny ephemeral batches of this quark-gluon soup, a fluid which physicist Paul Sorensen says is the most “perfect” fluid ever discovered.