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 ...
How did they measure the temperature in the reaction?
Obummer is breaking the law. He, the quirk, and his wife, the glue-on, are plastic.
Very carefully?
The only thing that can measured directly is the distribution and energy of the collision products, as in any particle accelerator experiment. I’m looking at a hard copy of a 2007 Nature article, THE QUEST FOR THE QUARK-GLUON PLASMA, and I see a little diagram that shows the inferred fireball temperature plateauing, as a function of collison energy, at 160Mev. This is E = kT, giving T = E/k = 1.85 Terakelvin.
The news article says they measured temperatures of 4 Terakelvin. As far as I understand it, the 1.85 Tk is the “freeze out” temperature of the fireball, when the quarks recombine into hadrons. The higher temperature is inferred from the total rest and kinetic energy of the collision products. That is, there will be more of them as the fireball cools by converting kinetic energy into mass until it reaches the “freeze out” temperature.
Ya can't change the laws of physics!
sure - gravity
Perhaps the ‘telling right from left’ is related to the thingies having to align in linear time, to previous or future direction, a dilemma later ended by the now standing laws of ‘cooler Physics’? ... On a serious note: every particle no matter how small has a segment of time and an orientation to space ... as in a where when for eveything confined in spacetime.
lol
Was Elton John involved?
Lol. Very interesting article.
WHY DID THEY USE GOLD?
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
Why are they using Gold?
Big nuclei. Less misses.
I have no particular idea other than it might have unique properties. Maybe because it's not very reactive chemically, although gold nuclei implies gold ions, i.e. gold atoms stripped of one or more electrons? IIRC, all these particle accelerators use ions or electrons.
Very interesting! However, this was already demonstrated on a much larger scale on November 4, 2008...
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