In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature

NY Times ^ | February 16, 2010 | DENNIS OVERBYE

[Citizen Tom Paine]

How did they measure the temperature in the reaction?

[bunkerhill7]

Obummer is breaking the law. He, the quirk, and his wife, the glue-on, are plastic.

[zeugma]

How did they measure the temperature in the reaction?

Very carefully?

[dr_lew]

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.

[Vince Ferrer]

Ya can't change the laws of physics!

[WorkerbeeCitizen]

sure - gravity

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks GeronL. Was Elton John involved? ;')

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[MHGinTN]

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.

[GeronL]

lol

[rdl6989]

Was Elton John involved?

Lol. Very interesting article.

[LomanBill]

>>If you can break a low of nature, >>was it really a law?

{Shrug} It's onlt a model..

[TomasUSMC]

WHY DID THEY USE GOLD?

[TomasUSMC]

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?

[onedoug]

Big nuclei. Less misses.

[neverdem]

WHY DID THEY USE GOLD?

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.

[SuperLuminal]

"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, ... "

Very interesting! However, this was already demonstrated on a much larger scale on November 4, 2008...