Red Matter

Published May 08, 2009
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What exactly is "red matter" in the Star Trek movie?

I believe this might be some miss guided, artistic license, play on quantum chromodynamics and the strong force. There is what is known as color charge that is formulated to explain quark confinement and the residual of this why protons/neutrons can bind together to form larger groupings. The reason why it is called "color charge" is because it has three aspects so the primary colors red, green, and blue were chosen even though it has nothing to do with color. Gluons (what "glues" it all together) only come in "color" pairs of a color/anticolor. So this "Red Matter" can't be a Gluon but it can still leave the possibility of it being an exotic form of Quark matter. When Quarks combine to form say a Proton (two Up Quarks and a Down Quark) the Proton is "color" neutral since each Quark is a different color. But these Quarks are constantly changing color by exchanging Gluons. The possibility is that this "Red Matter" is some large mass of singularly "colored" Quarks of the Red charge. Of course this is by name only and by some miss guided, artistic license, running off a bit too far and made it ACTUALLY red. Being all the same color charge they would want to repel very strongly and explode. But even then they would start to exchange Gluons and change colors and color confinement would kick in. Because of this and the explosion in progress it becomes more energetically favorable for a new quark/anti-quark pair to spontaneously appear out of the vacuum. One would now have possibly a runaway chain reaction of mass/energy in a relatively small region warping space and time into a black hole. But of course this is just idle speculation on a movie plot device that wasn't talked about more than its color and that it makes black holes.
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