Cornell Notes
(specifically
Class: Science
Questions, Pictures, Graphs,
Definitions, Quotes, etc:
Wha uh.. well this is quite
complicated but heres a
question.
What would happen if this quark
gluon plasma lasted longer?
Summary:
Topic: What happens when you break the laws of physics?
Newtons third law.)
Notes:
Not much is known about breaking the third law of
motion, even though there have been multiple
experiments, no one really knows what happens on
the microscopic level.
When a particle breaks Newtons third law, they are
said to have nonreciprocal interactions.
Newtons third law can be broken in non-equilibrium
(out-of-balance) situations.
Some surprising things have been discovered when
this happens though, like extreme temperature
gradients on the particle scale.
Scientists in the Brookhaven lab and the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider may have created a symmetry
breaking bubble of space where parity no longer
existed.
Parity, a long thought fundamental law of nature,
essentially states that the laws of physics remain
unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates,
and that the universe is neither right or left handed.
The team using, smashing the nuclei of gold atoms,
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, also known as
the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Scientist believe that the quark-gluon plasma, which
has a temperature of four trillion degrees Celsius,
existed after the big bang, when the universe was
only a microsecond old.
The plasma at the RHIC lasted only a mere millionth
of a billionth of a second.
The equally gargantuan magnetic field produced by
plasma, the strongest ever created, alerted the
physicists that one of natures laws might have been
broken.
Breaking the laws of physics can happen a lot of ways and does interesting
things. Its been done before by scientists but we still dont fully understand
it. We know that you can break it in non-equilibrium circumstances and that
they particles become extremely weird and that a lot of heat energy and
plasma is created from breaking the laws of physics even on the smallest
scale. We know it is very very dangerous, and that smashing particles is the
easiest way.