Recreating the First Microsecond: What Heavy-Ion Collisions Reveal About the Universe's Secrets

In "Secrets of the Universe" the narrator, Manuel Calderon de la Barca Sanchez, tells us that experimental studies of heavy-ion collisions have "proven the theory of the quark-gluon epoch, a lost world a millionth of a second after the Big Bang…with a temperature a million times hotter than the Sun, …a strange plasma more liquid than water". After briefly outlining the experimental evidence from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva and the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York that led to the film makers drawing these profound conclusions, I will highlight some more recent results that are revealing how this primordial plasma of quarks and gluons coalesced into the Universe we inhabit today.