Strong matter: Rethinking philosophically

• 来源期刊: 中国科学:物理学 力学 天文学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2018,（10）
• 页码范围: 108-112
• 页数: 5页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

As we continue to comprehend the underlying nature of matter in different forms,human civilization develops further.Normal matter in everyday life,the basic stuff of which was posited by speculators even before Socrates,is dominated by electromagnetic interaction,and it could hence be simply termed electric matter.Analogously,gravitationally controlled systems (e.g.,galaxies and galaxy clusters) belong to gravitational matter,and atomic nuclei to strong matter.What if normal baryonic matter is compressed intensely by gravity so that a huge number of nuclei would gradually merge to form a gigantic nucleus? This is certainly of strong matter,and will be discussed succinctly here.We argue that 2-flavored (u and d quarks) nucleons constitute a microscopic nucleus,but 3-flavored (u,d and s quarks) strangeons constitute a gigantic nucleus.This has profound implications in astrophysics and cosmology,as explained in this essay.