For One Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature

opa.yale.edu...
SO maybe it is possible to break some laws of physics? I wonder now, what laws can we break and how?

Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force, which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances. Now this law appears to have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists, including Jack Sandweiss, Yale's Donner Professor of Physics. Since 2000, Sandweiss has been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together as part of the STAR experiment at RHIC, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator, to study the law of parity under the resulting extreme conditions. The team created something called a quark-gluon plasma — a kind of "soup" that results when energies reach high enough levels to break up protons and neutrons into their constituent quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter. Theorists believe this kind of quark-gluon plasma, which has a temperature of four trillion degrees Celsius, existed just after the Big Bang, when the universe was only a microsecond old. The plasma "bubble" created in the collisions at RHIC lasted for a mere millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, yet the team hopes to use it to learn more about how structure in the universe — from black holes to galaxies — may have formed out of the soup.

Wow! This planet is starting to get exciting!

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[edit on 20/3/2010 by ArMaP]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by Gentill Abdulla]

Cool find. However, I can't help but wonder if it is even possible for scientists to measure time down to the "millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second". that seems a bit far fetched to me...but I digress, as I am no expert in time...or physics...or plasma "bubbles".

reply to post by Aggie Man


I read somewhere that some of the atomic clocks are so accurate, that they have become even more difficult to read. So you would have to find a clock that is faster than your own to measure the clock! Oh the irony!

But.. But... The right hand rule.. is used EVERYWHERE in physics!

Heh just kidding. This is a cool possibility and scientists have been chasing this level of "soup" for quite a while now.

Well...i have to say i'm surprised.

NOT that a precious 'impossible' to break physical law has been, but more at the deafening silence of all the 'The laws of physics cannot be broken' crowd.

Ironic, that i've been saying in every conversation i've had with these people, that the so called laws only hold true, for established systems, methodologies and processes and WHEN we discover a new method, system, or process or combination thereof, the laws will either be proven incorrect, or will require an addendum.

Do i feel vindicated? No, i feel pissed at the wasted hours i've spent trying to get through to them, that we are on a linear road of knowledge, not at the pinnacle, and to suggest otherwise...repeatedly is short-sighted and arrogant.

Perhaps now the people who scream and recite these so called laws at energy experimenters, will be slightly less vocal...although i doubt it.

I think the difference here is that this group presented their evidence/measurements of breaking the "laws of physics" for peer review as well as a explaination of how/why the law was broken. If the experiement cannot be duplicated then it will be treated they same as every other claim.

[edit on 20-3-2010 by garritynet]

reply to post by garritynet


Perhaps, but the very point of them, the experts, even saying that it *appears* that they have broken a fundamental law of physics, long held as an absolute, speaks volumes.

If they did it once, and unless they just got really, really lucky with a passing micro-wormhole or a particle of exotic matter strayed, unannounced into the reaction chamber at the precise moment of the experiment, or any other equally strange or unlikely event, they'll do it again.

I should be pleased in a sense, but i'm seething with anger at my own species. If i could get off, i would.

I'm sorry OP, i'm forgetting my manners..thank you for posting this.



[edit on 20/3/2010 by spikey]

So what’s next? Colliding them at 14 Tev, and finding the higgs boson? Thanks for the info. S&F

Also I think it is interesting that the quarks knew were to go. Seems like a universal consciousness to me at the macroscopic level. But that might just seem ridiculous, as I am no scientist lol.

Edit: Sorry I thought this thread was the duplicate but it's the original!

Good thread.

Originally posted by Aggie Man
Cool find. However, I can't help but wonder if it is even possible for scientists to measure time down to the "millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second". that seems a bit far fetched to me...but I digress, as I am no expert in time...or physics...or plasma "bubbles".

Planck time
As of 2006, the smallest unit of time that was directly measured was on the order of 1 attosecond (10−18 s)

You may be right. Isn't a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second just a fraction of an attosecond? If so, as of 2006 we weren't able to measure that small an interval, though I'm not sure how small an interval we can measure today.

[edit on 21-3-2010 by Arbitrageur]

reply to post by Arbitrageur


No this is the original thread.

Like I said above, would anyone say maybe a universal consciousness in this experiment?

reply to post by Gentill Abdulla


No they did not break a physical law. If they had then it would not be a law. What they did was push the limits of our understanding of said "parity" law.

The reason I say this is because if the law were "fundemental" it would be infallible. So we expanded our knowledge of a known law.

If someone comes along with an experiment proving reverse causality or something along the lines of breaking thermodynamics I would be impressed. As thermodynamics are the most rock solid "laws" we know about.

Originally posted by Aggie Man
Cool find. However, I can't help but wonder if it is even possible for scientists to measure time down to the "millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second". that seems a bit far fetched to me...but I digress, as I am no expert in time...or physics...or plasma "bubbles".

They extrapolate mathematicly from the computer data details about the smallest time frames. Below the planck scale no meaningful measurments can be made. They can't physically measure these small times but computers can and through known equations data is extrapolated.

[edit on 21-3-2010 by constantwonder]

Here's another quark parity violation study

www.springerlink.com...

www.amazon.com...=pd_sim_b_3

New book on antimatter.

www.guardian.co.uk...

spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/book-review-antimatter-by-frank-close

Despite that, the first chapter makes as many promises as Lothario, then whispers seductively of a huge chunk of antimatter from space having caused the mysterious 1908 Tunguska event. (A favorite topic of Internet conspiracy theorists, this massively destructive explosion in Russia has hitherto been attributed to black holes, aliens, and the crowd favorite, Nikola Tesla.) If that’s not enough, Close then speculates whether the U.S. Air Force is secretly spending millions to turn antimatter into a weapon. You’d have to be dead not to plunge headlong into chapter 2.

[edit on 21-3-2010 by drew hempel]

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Originally posted by constantwonder
reply to post by Gentill Abdulla

 

No they did not break a physical law. If they had then it would not be a law. What they did was push the limits of our understanding of said "parity" law.

The reason I say this is because if the law were "fundemental" it would be infallible. So we expanded our knowledge of a known law.

If someone comes along with an experiment proving reverse causality or something along the lines of breaking thermodynamics I would be impressed. As thermodynamics are the most rock solid "laws" we know about.

Originally posted by Aggie Man
Cool find. However, I can't help but wonder if it is even possible for scientists to measure time down to the "millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second". that seems a bit far fetched to me...but I digress, as I am no expert in time...or physics...or plasma "bubbles".

They extrapolate mathematicly from the computer data details about the smallest time frames. Below the planck scale no meaningful measurments can be made. They can't physically measure these small times but computers can and through known equations data is extrapolated.

[edit on 21-3-2010 by constantwonder]

Yes I am aware of that. It says MAY HAVE in the title. But I believe it is still interesting nonetheless. By the way did you get that u2u I sent you?

[edit on 21-3-2010 by Gentill Abdulla]