Yale Physics Prof. John W. Harris took attendees back to the beginning of the universe at the Hewlett Teaching Facility last night in a public lecture entitled “What is that Black Hole Doing in My Quark Soup?”

Harris spoke as part of the Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lecture series, which brings lecturers to campus to speak about physics and the physics of medicine.

In last night’s talk, Harris addressed the properties and formation of the “soup” of quarks and gluons that formed only a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe.

While there were not many students at the otherwise well-attended lecture, advertisement for the event sparked the interest of one undergraduate attendee.

“It’s so neat that there are just a bunch of random lectures here,” said Amy Kwon ‘10. “I was especially interested because the Introductory Seminar I took last quarter dealt a little in cosmology.”

Other audience members said they appreciated Harris’ ability to simplify and contextualize a complicated subject.

“I think what was so great about the lecture was that he took a topic that was so complicated and explained it in terms simple enough for laymen to understand,” said Mountain View resident Konrad Sosnow. “He’s a brilliant physicist and also a brilliant communicator.”

“It was oriented toward popular understanding of physics,” said Frank Muennemann, who lives in San Mateo County. “His presentation had no equations and only one graph, so you didn’t need a physics degree to understand the lecture.”

As part of his presentation, Harris played a recording of Albert Einstein, in which the famous physicist said that “very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy, and vice versa.” Einstein’s theory applies to Harris’ observations of high speed collisions of atomic nuclei that occur at a temperature of two trillion degrees Kelvin — a number 100,000 times hotter than the core of the sun.

When the collision occurs, 400 protons and neutrons split into as many as 8,000 particles of matter and anti-matter. What is fascinating about the substance that is formed, Harris said, is that it flows nearly perfectly.

“It’s thick, but it flows,” Harris said. “We were astonished.”

According to current theory, this thick, fluid substance is nearly identical to the composition of the universe in its earliest moments.

“We’re interested in going back in time and heating up matter to make this quark and gluon soup that existed 13.7 billion years ago,” Harris said. “Our main goal is to study it at higher temperatures and really determine its properties.”

Harris and his colleagues conducted their experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Further experiments will be carried out at the more powerful Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lecture series was established by the Physics Department in 1993, three years after the renowned physics professor passed away.

Hofstadter arrived at the University in 1950 and received the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics.

“Hofstadter’s teaching was characterized by the extreme clarity of his lectures, which was much appreciated by the undergraduates in the introductory physics series which he often taught,” read the program handed out at the event.

Like Harris and his colleagues, Hofstadter was interested in understanding the composition of matter and the structure of so-called “elementary particles.”