Did you just shit out the nineteen pounds of stuffing you conquered yesterday? Or are you like me, completely enraptured with the headline, but failing to comprehend the implications?

io9:

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator smashed together lead nuclei at the highest energies possible, creating dense sub-atomic particles that reach temperatures of over ten trillion degrees. Beyond being awesome, this achievement shows the early universe was actually a liquid.

Normal matter can’t exist in any form at these sort of absurdly hot temperatures. Instead, matter is thought to melt into a strange, soup-like substance known as quark-gluon plasma. Researchers are still investigating exactly what happens when this quark-gluon plasma emerges, but the early results seem to confirm the theory that the plasma acts like a liquid, not a gas.

Well uh, wait, then? So the entire universe existed as a soup-like substance known as quark-gluon plasma. That’s funny, since I seemed to blast some quark-gluon plasma inside my boxer-brief last night after my thirtieth pumpkin spice cookie.

io9:

“Although it is very early days we are already learning more about the early Universe. These first results would seem to suggest that the Universe would have behaved like a super-hot liquid immediately after the Big Bang.”

I love this sort of mind-warping speculation. I mean, since that’s what it really is, speculation. But it’s neat, no?