Physicists invalidate scientific law

[Barb]

For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook haven 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.

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.

Rest of article here: http://www.physorg.com/news188211977.html

EDIT (Evil Figment): Sorry Barb, changed your title because I was tired of the whole "OH NOES IT'S A LAW OF NATURE IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE BROKEN!" reaction.

 

[Our Wasted Years]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

I'm all for science but some things should just be left alone.

 

[The Rival]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

^ Agreed. This is quite risky...

Well, maybe.

 

[Izumoshep]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

I don't see anything dangerous with it, if some physicists wanna have fun smashing things together at near the speed of light, I say let them, so long as they don't kill us all.

 

[Nicoleta01]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

Agreed with insominac. o.o Some things aren't meant to be around in this day and age. Plasma soup being one of them. o.o

 

[Fig]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

And why not?

I mean, this doesn't seem like a particularly dangerous experience at all.

 

[Our Wasted Years]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

And why not?

I mean, this doesn't seem like a particularly dangerous experience at all.

Yes it might not seem like it but they are messing with forces that could do something bad. Professionals fuck up too, sometimes thing happen out of the blue...and I doubt breaking the Law of Nature is something they want to continue doing, in my opinion that is.

 

[Izumoshep]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

Yes it might not seem like it but they are messing with forces that could do something bad. Professionals fuck up too, sometimes thing happen out of the blue...and I doubt breaking the Law of Nature is something they want to continue doing, in my opinion that is.

My impressions were that Evil was trying to say this particular experiment is not as dangerous as you seem to think.

 

[Fig]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

"Breaking a law of nature" doesn't mean what you seem to think it mean.

The "Laws of nature" are not some immuable facts of life, or mystical forces that govern the world around us. They're how the scientists describe what happens around us.

For example, the law of universal gravitation doesn't make an apple fall toward the earth; it's the scientifical description of the process that makes an apple fall toward the earth.

Thus, if you're told that "Scientists break the law of gravitation!", it doesn't mean they made gravity stop working; it means that, through experimenting, they've discovered a situation where gravity doesn't work like scientists thought it would. Gravity itself still work the same way it always has and always will; scientists were just wrong about some of the details of how it work in some specific cases.

Same thing here. The scientists didn't "break the laws of nature" in the sense of making nature not work like it's supposed to; they discovered a situation where nature didn't quite work the way they expected it to. That means they now get to go back and try to fix their theory/law so that it explains how we now know things to work, instead of how we thought they worked.

 

[Rayne]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

What fascinates me about articles like these are the scientists ability to measure things on a seemingly infinitesimally small scale. "The plasma "bubble" created in the collisions at RHIC lasted for a mere millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second" Exactly how are these interactions measured on a time scale that precise that we can read any significant data off of them?

Apparently we just can. In a more relative frame of time, the plasma bubble made would be like witnessing one second over the period of 3*10¹⁶ years (or 30 trillion millenia)

 

[cowboy dan]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

This has inspired me to question my rabbit's ideas on where we all came from.

 

[Transfinite]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

Scientists have known that parity is broken for decades. Neutral kaons, anyone?

 

[Lord Fedora]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

I'd like to point out to the people declaring "BAD IDEA!" that breaking the laws of science and nature are in fact the very nature of science. The only constant in scientific fact and law is that will forever and always disprove itself. That's why being a physicist is so fun. Their job is to try and do things that are declared "impossible."

 

[Beligaronia]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

Well for a start, if we avoided doing things just because they were risky we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning, let alone conduct science experiments.

Also I'm sure they would love to break a fundamental law of nature again if they had the chance. That's how you get famous.

Look at Pascall. Before he did his experiments with mercury in a tube one of the prevailing "laws of nature" was that "Nature abhors a vacuum" and so they could not exist. His experiments with pressure showed that vacuums could and did exist. Now he's famous and has a scientific unit of measurement named after him.

And finally they may not have observed this law failing at all. Someone outside their lab may still be able to come up with an alternate explanation for the phenomenon they observed.

 

[BBHood]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

Being quite interested in physics, this thread makes me very, very happy. I need to start checking up on this section of bulbba more often.

 

[Falconwing]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

And why not?

I mean, this doesn't seem like a particularly dangerous experience at all.

Are you a trained physicist? I know I'm not and thus I'm rather concerned about tampering with the laws of nature. The last time scientists did that... two Japanese cities where destroyed in twin hellish explosions that vaporized people instantly and permanently burned their shadows in the sidewalk.

 

[Izumoshep]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

Are you a trained physicist? I know I'm not and thus I'm rather concerned about tampering with the laws of nature. The last time scientists did that... two Japanese cities where destroyed in twin hellish explosions that vaporized people instantly and permanently burned their shadows in the sidewalk.

No but the physicists who say the experiment is not dangerous are. And comparing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a terrible analogy for every reason conceivable.

I would also like to point out that laws are man made ideas, and are not found in nature, and therefore are changing when some new piece of evidence becomes uncovered. Therefore tampering with the given set of "laws" is not dangerous and is foolish to believe that because, some scientists are breaking a nonexistent idea we will all die.

Laws are our explanation of what happens in nature, they are not in nature.

 

[Falconwing]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

No but the physicists who say the experiment is not dangerous are. And comparing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a terrible analogy for every reason conceivable.

They are literally breaking the laws of physics to produce a substance that supposedly existed before the universe did. HOW IS THAT NOT DANGEROUS!?!?!?

Nature was not meant to be abused, to be mistreated, to be altered, to be challenged, to be controlled. Say what you will about Avatar, but it had a good point. You mess with nature and it will screw you over. Our actions with our environment has resulted in a global heating event. Now we're messing with atomic explosions from the event that possibly created the universe. Yeah, that sounds perfectly safe. And I don't care how secure they say everything is. Nature cannot be controlled. Can we manipulate weather? Yeah, on a REALLY minor scale.

 

[Izumoshep]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

They are literally breaking the laws of physics to produce a substance that supposedly existed before the universe did. HOW IS THAT NOT DANGEROUS!?!?!?

Because they did it last year, and all the fears of black hole and singularity and that crap, never came to light.

I trust what the physicists say over your irrational fears, because they have spent their entire lives working in their particular area while you have no idea or comprehension besides a few conspiracy theories that only get attention because they are so far fetched.

Nature was not meant to be abused, to be mistreated, to be altered, to be challenged, to be controlled. Say what you will about Avatar, but it had a good point. You mess with nature and it will screw you over. Our actions with our environment has resulted in a global heating event. Now we're messing with atomic explosions from the event that possibly created the universe. Yeah, that sounds perfectly safe. And I don't care how secure they say everything is. Nature cannot be controlled. Can we manipulate weather? Yeah, on a REALLY minor scale.

God, everything that is possible to be done in the universe can be done, meaning that if we can do it, it is not altering, abusing or mistreating anything. Global Warming has nothing to do with this, Red Herring. The US and Russia signed a treaty or somethin to reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles (blame North Korea). They are not testing nuclear explosions, Nature is not trying to be controlled. wtf has the weather got to do with anything.

 

[Falconwing]

Re: Physicists break law of nature

Because they did it last year, and all the fears of black hole and singularity and that crap, never came to light.

I trust what the physicists say over your irrational fears, because they have spent their entire lives working in their particular area while you have no idea or comprehension besides a few conspiracy theories that only get attention because they are so far fetched.

It took decades for the effects of global warming to be realized.

Time is a concept created by humans. The universe doesn't care if something happened 365 human days ago. If something is going to happen it will happen when it happens.