Instead of behaving like a perfect gas, in which every quark goes its own way independent of the others, the plasma seemed to act like a liquid. “It was a very big surprise,” Dr. Vigdor said, when it was discovered in 2005. Since then, however, theorists have revisited their calculations and found that the quark soup can be either a liquid or a gas, depending on the temperature, he explained. “This is not your father’s quark-gluon plasma,” said Barbara V. Jacak, of the State University at Stony Brook, speaking for the team that made the new measurements.

Image HOT A computer rendition of 4-trillion-degree Celsius quark-gluon plasma created in a demonstration of what scientists suspect shaped cosmic history. Credit... Brookhaven National Laboratory

It is now thought that the plasma would have to be a million times more energetic to become a perfect gas. That is beyond the reach of any conceivable laboratory experiment, but the experiments colliding lead nuclei in the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva next winter should reach energies high enough to see some evolution from a liquid to a gas.

Parity, the idea that the laws of physics are the same when left and right are switched, as in a mirror reflection, is one of the most fundamental symmetries of space-time as we know it. Physicists were surprised to discover in 1956, however, that parity is not obeyed by all the laws of nature after all. The universe is slightly lopsided in this regard. The so-called weak force, which governs some radioactive decays, seems to be left-handed, causing neutrinos, the ghostlike elementary particles that are governed by that force, to spin clockwise, when viewed oncoming, but never counterclockwise.

Under normal conditions, the laws of quark behavior observe the principle of mirror symmetry, but Dmitri Kharzeev of Brookhaven, a longtime student of symmetry changes in the universe, had suggested in 1998 that those laws might change under the very abnormal conditions in the RHIC fireball. Conditions in that fireball are such that a cube with sides about one quarter the thickness of a human hair could contain the total amount of energy consumed in the United States in a year.

All this energy, he said, could put a twist in the gluon force fields, which give quarks their marching orders. There can be left-hand twists and right-hand twists, he explained, resulting in space within each little bubble getting a local direction.

What makes the violation of mirror symmetry observable in the collider is the combination of this corkscrewed space with a magnetic field, produced by the charged gold ions blasting at one another. The quarks were then drawn one way or the other along the magnetic field, depending on their electrical charges.