In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16quark.html?ref=instapundit

by cwan • 16 years ago

37 25 16 years ago

nytimes.com

mattheww• 16 years ago

The work discussed was actually done at the PHENIX detector, not STAR.

lolcraft• 16 years ago

“This is not your father’s quark-gluon plasma,” said Barbara V. [...]

Indeed.

lurch_mojoff• 16 years ago

Hey, you break it, you buy it!

On a related note, where is my liquid-quark fueled warp engine? I'n not giving all that gold for you to propel to 99% c for nothing, am I?

Dumb, sophomoric "humor" aside, what practical implications does this discovery have? There is a blurb about proteins and what we can digest, which to a layman like me makes no sense, and something about a desolate universe made up of dark matter, which again fails to come home to me.

andrewcooke2• 16 years ago

not sure why gamache deleted their reply, but it was absolutely correct as far as i could see. anyway, in my own words, and more perhaps taking a more extreme stance: this, like most modern high energy physics / astronomy has very little practical use because it only makes a difference at energies so extreme that they are difficult / expensive to reproduce.

HeyLaughingBoy• 16 years ago

...so far.

The thing that occurred to me as I was reading this is how different life can be depending on how much energy is cheaply/freely available.

Think back to within the last century: I have more horsepower sitting in my driveway than the average small village of 100 years ago (and that's not counting the actual horses in my pasture :-) . Kilowatts of cheap electricity are available at every wall socket. How has that changed our lives? How much different would life be if gigawatts of power were available at that same wall outlet at the same cost?

dkimball• 16 years ago

On the other hand, difficult now doesn't mean difficult forever; an eighteen-wheeler would have been written off as requiring impossible amounts of energy to use, if someone had described it in the 16th Century. ("_How_ many horsepower?!")

"The same day as an article on the subject" is probably a little premature for any theories about its utility, too, although I'll certainly be interested if anyone who knows what he or she is talking about with physics thinks that this could be used to build an ansible or something...

russell• 16 years ago

No known practical application, but hey, it was just discovered. Besides, new physics is just plain interesting. The discussion of chirality in proteins was an analogy that just added to the confusion if you didnt know a little organic chemistry. Look up chirality in Wikipedia for a little background.

A dark matter universe would be a pretty bleak place because ther would be no ordinary matter, no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no me, no you,

aarongough3• 16 years ago

But surely dark matter would evolve complex systems the same way that normal matter has... It would probably just be very different to the things we are used to...

jpablo• 16 years ago

If you can break it then it wasn't really a law.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Exactly. People seem to take this 'law' business much too serious, we are discovering nature, we deduce the laws, and when our deductions are imperfect nature teaches us by showing instances of laws being broken.

Relativistic effects break classical mechanics, but only because of previous imperfect understanding. It all boils down to available evidence, as long as there is no evidence to the contrary a law is considered 'solid', less perfect but still practically usable even if there is a better one.

When computing how long it will take an elevator to crash in to the basement of a building you won't need relativistic effects accounted for. You probably don't have time for that anyway ;)

vinutheraj• 16 years ago

"The first source of difficulty is this – that it is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer. And as you develop more information in the sciences, it is not that you are finding out the truth, but that you are finding out that this or that is more or less likely.

That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty: "It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true;" or "such and such is almost certain but there is still a little bit of doubt;" or – at the other extreme – "well, we really don't know." Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth." - Richard P. Feynman

flipper• 16 years ago

Unfortunately that's the price paid for getting an interesting piece of science news into the main stream media - neither the journalist who wrote the article or his sub-editor probably have much grasp of what science is for so a hyperbolic but misleading headline is the order of the day.

dandelany• 16 years ago

True, but thinking of it as a "broken law" can be helpful in some situations. Relativity and Newtonian physics contradict each other at relativistic speeds, but it can be useful to think of these speeds as situations which "break" Newtonian laws and require the use of alternate laws rather than throwing out Newtonian laws entirely. F=MA is still considered "Newton's Second Law" regardless of the fact that it does not hold true in all situations.

Granted, this is a subtlety that scientists grasp easily, and laymen do not, so this article probably gave the wrong idea to many people who read it.

grinich• 16 years ago

A scientific law has a slightly different meaning than the colloquial connotation. The difference is subtle, but important:

A law differs from a scientific theory in that it does not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: it is merely a distillation of the results of repeated observation. As such, a law is limited in applicability to circumstances resembling those already observed, and is often found to be false when extrapolated. (via Wikipedia: Scientific Law)

One example is that "Hooke's law only applies to strain below the elastic limit." As another, the laws of classical mechanics break down on the Plank scale. This doesn't mean that classical mechanics is false; it simply means that the law is not applicable under some states. Laws do not explain why something happens and usually break under extreme extrapolation, such as this experiment.

F_J_H• 16 years ago

"In this house we will obey the laws of physics!"

-Homer Simpson to Lisa when she invented a perpetual motion machine or something like that for her science project.

daeken• 16 years ago

Actually, "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

jrockway• 16 years ago

It always annoys me when people misquote the Simpsons, because the popular quotes are popular enough to be googled even if you only have the gist. ("The Googles do nothing!", but the opposite.)

Someday I am going to write a "Quoting the Simpsons HOWTO", but I fear it will be too little too late.

MaysonL• 16 years ago

Interesting - I just finished reading Gregory Benford's novel Cosm, which explored an experiment much like this, at the Brookhaven RHIC (using U-238 rather than gold, and with much more dramatic results). A great read.

aarongough3• 16 years ago

It is indeed a great read! I've been reading a lot of books by Peter F. Hamilton lately, if you like Greogory Benford I think it's likely you would love Hamilton!

golwengaud• 16 years ago

RHIC press release: http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1073&t=pr

I couldn't find the actual paper -- the most recent paper on Arxiv from STAR, http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1641, is about the electric charge balance function.

In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature

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