Thursday, March 18, 2010

In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature.

Overbye, Dennis. In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature. New York Times, 15 Feb. 2010. Web. 18 Mar. 2010.

This article tells us how scientists broke a law of nature. They

did this by speeding up gold nuclei to 99.995% of the speed of light. They did

this to see if colliding nuclei can be broken down to quarks and gluons which

is a very high temperature plasma. Quark-gluon plasma is what existed

when the world was only a microsecond old. After doing this they found

that the freed quarks could tell left from right which breaks a law of nature.

This law is known as parity, the idea that laws are the same if switched from

left to right, negative to positive. The temperature of the quark=gluon

plasma was 4 trillion degrees Celsius and 250,000 times hotter than the

center of the sun.

I found this article very interesting, before reading this article

I didn’t know that nuclei could be broken down any further than it already

was.Also that we could get something to 99.995% of the speed of light and

something could be made the same heat as the sun no less 250,000 times

hotter than the sun, which to me is astounding.

Although this article was very well done it was very hard to understand

and to fully understand you would have to have had with scientific literature,

even though I think I understood it very well.

Zachary Mattes 3/18/10
Chem. Current Even

2 comments:

  1. Zach found a very interesting article to write about, which is always a plus, as it keeps the reader engaged. The precision of Zach’s facts were also a very well done part of his article, as they give the reader something concrete to think about and digest. For instance, he said the gold nuclei were 99.995% the speed of light. Finally, he told the reader what he learned and liked about the article, which might unveil some bias or opinions embedded in his review.
    One thing that would have improved the review is if it was better structured and flowed better. Most of the sentences were choppy and simple statements, and some of the wording was very awkward. Also, the review could’ve been expanded upon and been longer.
    This review and article have great implications for society and science, as the results of this experiment may change our perspective and one of our scientific laws, that being the law of parity, which ensures common laws in any position or charge of a mass. Anytime a concrete aspect of our knowledge changes or a flaw is challenged, though according to the article the scientists did distort space, rendering the annulling of parity obsolete, it is a big deal.

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  2. This was a very interesting topic to write about which also made it easier to read. One thing that I liked were how precise his facts were and also how well he used them. Another thing that I liked about this was the fact that he explained exactly what he liked about to us. One thing that he could have done better would have been if he had made the article flow a little bit better. The article a couple of turns that were not about the same thing. I generally liked the article in total and found the science very interesting. I hope we can learn more about this topic later.

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