

In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature - cwan
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16quark.html?ref=instapundit

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lolcraft
_“This is not your father’s quark-gluon plasma,” said Barbara V. [...]_

Indeed.

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jpablo
If you can break it then it wasn't really a law.

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grinich
A scientific law has a slightly different meaning than the colloquial
connotation. The difference is subtle, but important:

 _A law differs from a scientific theory in that it does not posit a mechanism
or explanation of phenomena: it is merely a distillation of the results of
repeated observation. As such, a law is limited in applicability to
circumstances resembling those already observed, and is often found to be
false when extrapolated._ (via Wikipedia: Scientific Law)

One example is that "Hooke's law only applies to strain below the elastic
limit." As another, the laws of classical mechanics break down on the Plank
scale. This doesn't mean that classical mechanics is false; it simply means
that the law is not applicable under some states. Laws do not explain _why_
something happens and usually break under extreme extrapolation, such as this
experiment.

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MaysonL
Interesting - I just finished reading Gregory Benford's novel _Cosm_ , which
explored an experiment much like this, at the Brookhaven RHIC (using U-238
rather than gold, and with much more dramatic results). A great read.

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aarongough
It is indeed a great read! I've been reading a lot of books by Peter F.
Hamilton lately, if you like Greogory Benford I think it's likely you would
love Hamilton!

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lurch_mojoff
Hey, you break it, you buy it!

On a related note, where is my liquid-quark fueled warp engine? I'n not giving
all that gold for you to propel to 99% c for nothing, am I?

Dumb, sophomoric "humor" aside, what practical implications does this
discovery have? There is a blurb about proteins and what we can digest, which
to a layman like me makes no sense, and something about a desolate universe
made up of dark matter, which again fails to come home to me.

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andrewcooke
not sure why gamache deleted their reply, but it was absolutely correct as far
as i could see. anyway, in my own words, and more perhaps taking a more
extreme stance: this, like most modern high energy physics / astronomy has
very little practical use because it only makes a difference at energies so
extreme that they are difficult / expensive to reproduce.

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HeyLaughingBoy
...so far.

The thing that occurred to me as I was reading this is how different life can
be depending on how much energy is cheaply/freely available.

Think back to within the last century: I have more horsepower sitting in my
driveway than the average small village of 100 years ago (and that's not
counting the actual horses in my pasture :-) . Kilowatts of cheap electricity
are available at every wall socket. How has that changed our lives? How much
different would life be if gigawatts of power were available at that same wall
outlet at the same cost?

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cousin_it
Once electric power stops being the limiting factor for home tasks, further
growth doesn't change your life much. Similarly with computing power: your PC
is probably idling most of the time. The interesting question is, what's the
limiting factor now?

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donaq
OTOH, we now have programs routinely run in homes (e.g. games) that
occasionally require computing power orders of magnitude higher than what was
available ten years ago. I expect that if we have orders of magnitude more
power deliverable to our homes, innovative people will find uses for them.

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golwengaud
RHIC press release:
[http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1073&t=pr](http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1073&t=pr)

I couldn't find the actual paper -- the most recent paper on Arxiv from STAR,
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1641>, is about the electric charge balance
function.

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F_J_H
"In this house we will obey the laws of physics!"

-Homer Simpson to Lisa when she invented a perpetual motion machine or something like that for her science project.

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daeken
Actually, "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

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jrockway
It always annoys me when people misquote the Simpsons, because the popular
quotes are popular enough to be googled even if you only have the gist. ("The
Googles do nothing!", but the opposite.)

Someday I am going to write a "Quoting the Simpsons HOWTO", but I fear it will
be too little too late.

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mattheww
The work discussed was actually done at the PHENIX detector, not STAR.

