For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature | Hacker News Reader

For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature

physorg.com

33 pointsnreece17 comments

Between this and Schroedinger's cat, is it that the universe is lazy-by-default evaluation, and eventually consistent (AP on the CAP axis)?

Yet another article about the parity breaking at rhic, i work in this field and while this would be very exciting it's not a cut and dry result. Running the numbers for the proposed theoretical cause of the parity violation leads to something a lot smaller than what is observed. While making simpler, non parity violating, arguments based on geometry and the elliptic flow in the fireball can get you near the right numbers.

See this paper for another explanation of the observed charge correlations http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1758

edit clarification

This writing is kind of silly. It goes from waffling May Have Broken a Law of Nature in the title to the definitive a law of nature had been broken in the first paragraph.

(I'm not a physicist, so I may be making an ass of myself. But...) If it was already demonstrated back in the 50's that the weak force violated the parity law, then it's not much of a law, is it? Tune in next week when law enforcement agents from the Dept. of Nature identify Zaphod Beeblebrox as a "person of interest".

To be fair, "Science experiment to disprove hypothesis disproves hypothesis," is a less exciting title.

What a letdown! The article begins with high drama ("Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun..."), then explains that scientists observed the parity law being violated by the strong force, which "was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances."

At least under normal circumstances??? Now I remember why I don't study particle physics!

Eh... this sort of double-speak annoys me, please forgive me for nit-picking but nature's laws are never broken. By definition. It is some human model of nature's laws that is broken.

"Nature's Laws" are constructs created by humans to describe nature. 'Nature' doesn't have laws, it is what it is.

This is a silly semantics game.

Nature behaves a certain way. That "is what it is" is what we call "nature's laws."

I think you're confusing "nature's laws" with the "laws of physics." The field of physics is a human construct, whereas nature is not. But really, it all depends on what you consider the definition to be, so I will not debate this further, as we both should understand what we each mean by this point. (Hopefully.)

You would think.

I took a course at Caltech named Philosophy of Science, and we spent weeks discussing what a "law of nature" is.

I think the article title is incorrect though. The law wasn't broken (that'd make sense if it was a legal system law), the law had been disproved, perhaps.

Broken could also be correct if it was a "law" currently in effect universally and only the high energy of the event lead to its violation i.e the physicists using high energies managed to circumvent something that usually holds true.

I think you guys would both agree that the "laws" of nature are descriptive as opposed to prescriptive.

We see patterns in the universe and label them "laws". Is it because the universe is by nature patterned, or is it because our limited minds, in trying to understand knowledge so vast, has to resort to patterns as a heuristic to approximate the universe?

  Nature behaves a certain way. [..]
  The field of physics is a human construct, whereas nature is not.

We don't know anything about the way nature behaves. The only thing we know is that physics (and chemistry, biology, etc.) seems to describe and predict the behavior pretty well. 'The laws of nature' are not a sensible thing we can refer to. It's like a square circle or 'outside the universe': you think you are making sense, but what you say doesn't actually mean anything. This is not a silly semantics game, but a very important truth about semantics: some seemingly meaningful statements just don't mean anything. There are only laws of the human construct 'physics'.

I don't understand why Confusion's comment is being downvoted -- was there some faux pas that I'm not seeing?

I think it may be because many people think we do in fact know at least something about how nature works. For a non-intuitive example, we can prove two particles are identical, and if nature worked a different way it would show up in experiments.

I think the problem is that conversation about these issues is very difficult, because language itself poses an obstacle and the same word is used to mean similar things that differ in important ways.

For instance, I used the word 'nature' to mean what my parent meant: some objective, true, reality, about which we have knowledge. However, this is meaningless in exactly the same way that I argued 'laws of nature' is meaningless. Our knowledge is limited to our accounts of our observations and the theories and stories we have come up with to explain and predict such observations. 'Nature' can not possibly mean anything else than something like: "the ideas, theories, images and narratives that describe our observations of our shared reality that seem to be independent of individual humans". But when 'nature' is used in that sense in my original comment, then my claim is tautological. And when you don't accept the word can't mean anything other than I claim, then does the argument make sense? I'm trying to argue a point, where I use a word in a way that I could not actually use the word. It requires a sort of schizophrenic state of mind to appreciate the argument.

(And of course, 'nature' does mean other things: a landscape painter will have entirely different concepts and images in mind when we use that word. There may be parts of that meaning that are so bound to the individual entertaining the concept that they cannot even be conveyed to another human.)

All of this is, BTW, not very novel and hasn't sprung from my mind. My argument basically follows the argument as Hilary Putnam used in 'Brains in vat'. And it wasn't new then.

There is no proof that Nature behaves a certain way. We observe how nature behaves and then induce that Nature will continue to behave that way. Induction has it's own problems -- it's little more than an educated guess.

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