Posted on 02/20/2010 12:21:26 PM PST by neverdem
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...
--snip--
One test of the result, he said, would be to run RHIC at a lower energy and see if the effect went away when there was not enough oomph in the beam to distort space-time. The idea of parity might seem like a very abstract and mathematical concept, but it affects our chemistry and biology. It is not only neutrinos that are skewed. So are many of the molecules of life, including proteins, which are left-handed, and sugars, which are right-handed.
The chirality, or handedness, of molecules prevents certain reactions from taking place in chemistry and biophysics, Dr. Sandweiss noted, and affects what we can digest...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If you can break a low of nature, was it really a law? Or just a suggestion.
Breaking the laws of physics usually carry a heavy penalty.
Is the giant Swiss collider still off-line?
Not much of a law at all.
Is this what a future ion engine would be? A giant particle accellerator?
yeah, sure they do, times. look for this one soon: in some black box in belgium, scientists prove there is no God but Obama.
Breaking a nature law? Its in vogue these days, as pol’s routinely break constitutional law.
Diabetes helps explain obesity-birth defect link
Controversial Diabetes Drug Harms Heart, U.S. Concludes
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
You Canno change the laws of Physics,
Laws of Physics,
Laws of Physics,
You Canno change the laws of Physics,
Jim
Star Trekin’, cross the Universe.......
How do you know? Have you done it before?
NO! Don't free them! Please!
All ion engines are particle accelerators. You get to choose how big.
The fundamental problem for extended space exploration is one of mass. You might have some kind of nuclear reactor (preferably the fusion kind) to give you energy, but what you need is reaction mass also.
So in the future we'll have plenty of on-board energy but can't afford too much mass.
Fortunately, the thrust (or impulse, which is thrust over a period of time) is the product of the exhaust velocity (which comes from your energy source) and the mass you eject. So you accelerate your mass to the highest exhaust velocity you can, in order to maximize its impulse.
One further gain is that as you accelerate the fuel mass on board to near the speed of light, it gains significant mass (relative to the spacecraft frame of reference). Above 99%, every tenth, every hundredth, every thousandth part of the velocity you can give your reaction mass pays off in substantial increases in its effective mass, and therefore in its thrust per unit mass consumed.
If we could ever fully harness the deuterim-tritium fusion reaction in a rocket engine, we might have rocket efficiencies tens of thousands of times what can be obtained with any chemical rocket. It would completely change our relationship with space--both near-earth and interplanetary.
I agree.. my brother is very wise.. science and math minded...I just mailed this to him...he says what they are doing is very dangerous then tried to explain to me why...after his first two sentences he lost me entirely...but I get that it’s dangerous.
They are in the process of testing circuits and bringing it up to design power. The mechanical problems are repaired, and the design was changed to prevent the sort of damage that it caused itself last year. Beams are supposed to be reintroduced End-February; which follows some lower energy beams circulating and colliding about a month ago.
"Parity violation", meaning the laws of physics are NOT the same for a mirror image of some interaction, was found in the 1950's. It was supposed at that time that the mirror image with reversed charges ( positrons for electrons etc. ) would restore the identical behavior, so that so-called CP-symmetry would hold.
In 1964, interactions were discovered that violated this symmetry as well, winning a 1980 Nobel prize for the experimenters. What remains is CPT symmetry. See the wiki article on CP violation for a discussion of the relevance of this to matter antimatter imbalance.
This is where these new results come in. Overbye has evidently "dumbed down" his reporting a bit, although I suspect some of this is involuntary. He says the plasma conditions lasted for "only a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second". This is better than an article previously cited on FR which said they lasted milliseconds, but this is actually too short, being 10-27 seconds. I found a survey paper that gave the time as 10-22 seconds, which squares better with some back-of-the-envelope considerations I tried.
The title "In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature" is a freakish statement, because "nature" does not work by it's own "laws" being subject to being broken.
The factual statement, from which they derived the title, was:
"Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics[bold added], providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history."
That's "laws of physics"; the human made "laws" reflecting the state of human understanding of physics. Whatever "laws of nature" were exposed in the experiment, one can be sure they were not broken.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.