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.