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.

Originally posted by Aggie Man
Cool find. However, I can't help but wonder if it is even possible for scientists to measure time down to the "millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second". that seems a bit far fetched to me...but I digress, as I am no expert in time...or physics...or plasma "bubbles".

Despite that, the first chapter makes as many promises as Lothario, then whispers seductively of a huge chunk of antimatter from space having caused the mysterious 1908 Tunguska event. (A favorite topic of Internet conspiracy theorists, this massively destructive explosion in Russia has hitherto been attributed to black holes, aliens, and the crowd favorite, Nikola Tesla.) If that’s not enough, Close then speculates whether the U.S. Air Force is secretly spending millions to turn antimatter into a weapon. You’d have to be dead not to plunge headlong into chapter 2.

Originally posted by constantwonder
reply to post by Gentill Abdulla

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No they did not break a physical law. If they had then it would not be a law. What they did was push the limits of our understanding of said "parity" law.

The reason I say this is because if the law were "fundemental" it would be infallible. So we expanded our knowledge of a known law.

If someone comes along with an experiment proving reverse causality or something along the lines of breaking thermodynamics I would be impressed. As thermodynamics are the most rock solid "laws" we know about.

Originally posted by Aggie Man
Cool find. However, I can't help but wonder if it is even possible for scientists to measure time down to the "millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second". that seems a bit far fetched to me...but I digress, as I am no expert in time...or physics...or plasma "bubbles".

They extrapolate mathematicly from the computer data details about the smallest time frames. Below the planck scale no meaningful measurments can be made. They can't physically measure these small times but computers can and through known equations data is extrapolated.

[edit on 21-3-2010 by constantwonder]