Some laws of nature were meant to be broken....

In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature

Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.

The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.

The departure from normal physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.

This happened in bubbles smaller than the nucleus of an atom, which lasted only a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. But in these bubbles were “hints of profound physics,” in the words of Steven Vigdor, associate director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven. Very similar symmetry-breaking bubbles, at an earlier period in the universe, are believed to have been responsible for breaking the balance between matter and its opposite antimatter and leaving the universe with a preponderance of matter.

“We now have a hook” into how these processes occur, Dr. Vigdor said, adding in an e-mail message, “IF the interpretation of the RHIC results turns out to be correct.” Other physicists said the results were an important window into the complicated dynamics of quarks, which goes by the somewhat whimsical name of Quantum Chromo Dynamics.

To the pitiable extent that I get what that means, that is pretty cool. Is it a "law" of nature if it can be broken? Well, I guess they figured out a way to get outside our present nature's "jurisdiction". This is the sort of thing that would cause real consternation among conservatives if they followed science instead of other folks' sex lives. Breaking actual laws of nature? Sheesh. It might cause earthquakes.

(It wouldn't. I'm being facetious. And the bright people at CERN aren't going to uncover a God particle that damns us all. Probably. Anyway, if it gives us a glimpse into how the universe we observe got this way--that's awesome, because there's so much we don't know. )