Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature

[n2doc]

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: February 15, 2010
Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.

The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.

The departure from normal physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.

This happened in bubbles smaller than the nucleus of an atom, which lasted only a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. But in these bubbles were “hints of profound physics,” in the words of Steven Vigdor, associate director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven. Very similar symmetry-breaking bubbles, at an earlier period in the universe, are believed to have been responsible for breaking the balance between matter and its opposite antimatter and leaving the universe with a preponderance of matter.

more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16quark.html

[xfundy]

1. Maybe they can use it to go back in time

.... and stop the supremes from illegally installing * in the White House!

At this point, I'll hope for anything.

[roguevalley]

6. I doubt that our understanding of physics is beyond the amoeba stage.

I love this stuff.

[HeresyLives]

2. Well if you can break it,however briefly,

then it's not a law.

[TheMadMonk]

3. You can if you change the conditions. However briefly. nt

[krispos42]

4. I went to Brookhaven once on a repair mission.

Nothing so sexy as particle physics, though... I was off fixing a protein crystallography robot in a chemistry lab someplace.

:-)

[pokerfan]

5. 4 trillion degrees Celsius!