system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How are temperatures such as "4 Trillion degrees Celsius" possible on a machine without burning everything down?

I was reading the following

> Quark-gluon soup
> Credit: CERN.
> Another amazing feat of physics came out of Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider this year. In February 2010 scientists announced they'd created a "quark-gluon soup" where protons and neutrons had broken up into their constituent building blocks – quarks and gluons.
> 
> It took extremely powerful collisions of gold atoms in the accelerator to achieve the temperatures necessary – about 7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (4 trillion degrees Celsius). These conditions are 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and similar to temperatures seen just after the birth of the universe. They were the hottest temperatures ever reached on Earth."


It confused me. I always thought that a temperature that high, even for a fraction of a second would destroy everything in its vicinity.     

How are temperatures like that even possible without damaging the collider? And if we can make machines that resistant why don't we make one that could travel to Mercury ?
gpt
You aren't talking about much matter getting up to that temperature in this scenario.  Maybe a micro gram of gold, maybe.  The inside of the collider is a vacuum which provides almost zero heat transfer to the surroundings so that helps to shield it a lot and buy a bit of time for things to cool down, but for the most part the energies involved are just too small.  A microgram of gold at 4 trillion C has enough heat to bring a kilogram of material with similar specific heat up to only 4000 C, not much.  Spread that out across the hundreds of kilograms of mass that would be impacted and you might see a temperature increase that you could measure.

In short, its a matter of scale.