As part of my continuing efforts to avoid thinking about this law for as long as possible, I happened across an article that made about as much sense to me as the 2,500+ page behemoth signed earlier today, only without any of the damaging long-term implications of H.R. 3590:
Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.
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.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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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.
I’m pretty sure I don’t really understand everything being discussed in there, but terms like “parity violation” and “quark-gluon plasma” certainly make it fun to read about. (Can we really be talking about “breaking a law of nature” here, though? Wouldn’t we just have to re-adjust what we’ve been calling a law? How would an actual “law of nature” be broken, anyway?)