For a Tiny Instant, Physicists Broke a Law of Nature

An intrigu­ing bit of news from the Yale Bul­letin. It begins:

For a brief instant, it appears, sci­en­tists at Brook haven Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry on Long Island recent­ly dis­cov­ered a law of nature had been bro­ken.

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.

You can read more about what went down here. And, if you want to brush up your physics, head over to the Physics sec­tion of our Free Online Course col­lec­tion. There you’ll find free physics cours­es from Yale, Stan­ford, MIT and oth­er fine insti­tu­tions of high­er learn­ing.