Conquer Club

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

"For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook­haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken. Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed."

"When the gold nuclei, traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light, smashed together, the plasma that resulted was so energetic that a tiny cube of it with sides measuring about a quarter of the width of a human hair would contain enough energy to power the entire United States for a year."

This is pretty crazy. If there was a way to harness that kind of energy it would be incredible.

OK but - strictly, if you've broken it, you've proved it isn't a law of nature...

Yea that's very true they should probably shouldn't be calling it a law. However the article did say it only may have been broken. Does anyone know what the law of parity actually is? I'm not too sure what it's meaning is.

jonesthecurl wrote:OK but - strictly, if you've broken it, you've proved it isn't a law of nature...

Not necessarily... as it depends on how you define terms like "the universe" and even "law of nature". Let me try to explain...

This Law of Nature may be very valid in the universe in which we exist.

This collision may have released so much energy that for the briefest of moments what these scientists were looking at wasn't something in our universe... but instead something outside it. Science Fiction writers may call it a pocket universe or a parallel universe or perhaps a hole in our universe.

Assuming this is the case (a big assumption of course)... then the Laws of Nature for our universe remain unchanged. The Laws of Nature for this "pocket universe" are different.

In the same way this transaction or event could not have occurred in our universe... nor could we (us, people, life) exist in this pocket universe.

Make sense?

Not to me either... but it's fun to speculate on.

BenBailey wrote:Yea that's very true they should probably shouldn't be calling it a law. However the article did say it only may have been broken. Does anyone know what the law of parity actually is? I'm not too sure what it's meaning is.

For ever action there is an equal but opposite reaction.

Most basic example in Physics 1 is when talking about the application of force on an object in space. If you are in space and you are holding something, say a box... if you push this box away from you with force = x... there is a counter force equal to x, but in the exact opposite direction. The box will move in space away from this point in space with an acceleration equal to its' mass divided by the force applied... but you will also move away from this point in space with an acceleration equal to your mass divided but the force (x).

If your mass and the mass of the box were equal, then your acceleration from this starting point would be equal as well... except in the opposite direction.

It's cute that they think that they may have broken a law of physics.

When the gold nuclei, traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light, smashed together, the plasma that resulted was so energetic that a tiny cube of it with sides measuring about a quarter of the width of a human hair would contain enough energy to power the entire United States for a year.

Ummm. Yeah, sure.
How much energy does it take to cause this phenomenon?
When you make things collide at such high velocities, the impact would more than likely be ridiculous.

First of all it is important to understand that all "laws" are approximations, based on the observable evidence at the time.

Netonian physics breaks down at speeds approaching light.

Quantum mechanics breaks down in singularities.

etc.

It doesn't mean the laws are broken but that they are approximations and every law has a place where the approximation goes off.

BenBailey wrote:Yea that's very true they should probably shouldn't be calling it a law. However the article did say it only may have been broken. Does anyone know what the law of parity actually is? I'm not too sure what it's meaning is.

[Parity] essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed -- that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates.

Sounds like it's some fairly mathematical to me.

MeDeFe wrote:

BenBailey wrote:Yea that's very true they should probably shouldn't be calling it a law. However the article did say it only may have been broken. Does anyone know what the law of parity actually is? I'm not too sure what it's meaning is.

[Parity] essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed -- that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates.

Sounds like it's some fairly mathematical to me.

That is correct - parity is actually a precisely defined mathematical concept and I'm sure the journalists who covered the article have no idea what parity violation is, since one needs to have taken an advanced course in quantum mechanics to understand it...