Imagining the Tenth Dimension - A Book by Rob Bryanton. US/LHC - Large Hadron Collider. Physics.org | Home.
For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature. This image of a full-energy collision between gold ions shows the paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced during the impact. For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brookhaven 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. Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. 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. It was the equally gargantuan magnetic field produced by the plasma — the strongest ever created — that alerted the physicists that one of nature's laws might have been broken. How Quantum Suicide Works".
A man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; it's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle -- or quark -- is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. Nervously, the man takes a breath and pulls the trigger. Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. But, wait. This thought experiment is called quantum suicide.