5 ms·

Hey, you break it, you buy it! On a related note, where is my liquid-quark fueled warp engine? I'n not giving all that gold for you to propel to 99% c for noth

Hey, you break it, you buy it! On a related note, where is my liquid-quark fueled warp engine? I'n not giving all that gold for you to propel to 99% c for nothing, am I? Dumb, sophomoric "humor" aside, what practical implications does this discovery have? There is a blurb about proteins and what we can digest, which to a layman like me makes no sense, and something about a desolate universe made up of dark matter, which again fails to come home to me.

gamache 17y ago
what practical implications does this discovery have? Few to none, at least in the near term. This discovery tells us that a few "laws" of nature are really just approximations; that different rules come into play during nearly unfathomable conditions of energy and velocity. Since scientists believe the very earliest conditions in the universe were similar to this experiment, this discovery indicates that the universe would not have followed these "laws" at first. And since the discovery is primarily concerned with symmetry not being maintained, it hints at possible explanations for various asymmetries -- for instance, the fact that the universe appears to contain much more matter than antimatter.
andrewcooke 17y ago
not sure why gamache deleted their reply, but it was absolutely correct as far as i could see. anyway, in my own words, and more perhaps taking a more extreme stance: this, like most modern high energy physics / astronomy has very little practical use because it only makes a difference at energies so extreme that they are difficult / expensive to reproduce.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
  ...so far. The thing that occurred to me as I was reading this is how different life can be depending on how much energy is cheaply/freely available. Think back to within the last century: I have more horsepower sitting in my driveway than the average small village of 100 years ago (and that's not counting the actual horses in my pasture :-) . Kilowatts of cheap electricity are available at every wall socket. How has that changed our lives? How much different would life be if gigawatts of power were available at that same wall outlet at the same cost?
  - cousin_it 17y ago
    Once electric power stops being the limiting factor for home tasks, further growth doesn't change your life much. Similarly with computing power: your PC is probably idling most of the time. The interesting question is, what's the limiting factor now?
    - donaq 17y ago
      OTOH, we now have programs routinely run in homes (e.g. games) that occasionally require computing power orders of magnitude higher than what was available ten years ago. I expect that if we have orders of magnitude more power deliverable to our homes, innovative people will find uses for them.
- dkimball 17y ago
  On the other hand, difficult now doesn't mean difficult forever; an eighteen-wheeler would have been written off as requiring impossible amounts of energy to use, if someone had described it in the 16th Century. ("_How_ many horsepower?!") "The same day as an article on the subject" is probably a little premature for any theories about its utility, too, although I'll certainly be interested if anyone who knows what he or she is talking about with physics thinks that this could be used to build an ansible or something...
  - andrewcooke 17y ago
    there's no obvious connection between this symmetry breaking (handedness) and faster than light travel. you could argue that limitations for ftl come from translational symmetry (conservation of momentum and energy), but that's not what was broken here, as far as i know.
russell 17y ago
No known practical application, but hey, it was just discovered. Besides, new physics is just plain interesting. The discussion of chirality in proteins was an analogy that just added to the confusion if you didnt know a little organic chemistry. Look up chirality in Wikipedia for a little background. A dark matter universe would be a pretty bleak place because ther would be no ordinary matter, no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no me, no you,
- aarongough 17y ago
  But surely dark matter would evolve complex systems the same way that normal matter has... It would probably just be very different to the things we are used to...
  - Sandman 17y ago
    Nobody said anything about dark matter: We like symmetry, Dr. Kharzeev, of Brookhaven, noted, but if the symmetry between matter and antimatter had not been broken long ago, “the universe would be a very desolate place.” The reason why universe would be a very desolate place is because if there was symmetry between matter and antimatter, they would immediately annihilate themselves. Why exactly is the observable universe composed almost entirely out of matter and not antimatter is now one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics, although several hypotheses exist - some of which even propose that there is also a universe composed almost entirely out of antimatter.
    - aarongough 17y ago
      I was replying to the comment above mine... A dark matter universe would be a pretty bleak place because ther would be no ordinary matter, no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no me, no you,

gamache 17y ago

what practical implications does this discovery have? Few to none, at least in the near term. This discovery tells us that a few "laws" of nature are really just approximations; that different rules come into play during nearly unfathomable conditions of energy and velocity. Since scientists believe the very earliest conditions in the universe were similar to this experiment, this discovery indicates that the universe would not have followed these "laws" at first. And since the discovery is primarily concerned with symmetry not being maintained, it hints at possible explanations for various asymmetries -- for instance, the fact that the universe appears to contain much more matter than antimatter.

andrewcooke 17y ago

not sure why gamache deleted their reply, but it was absolutely correct as far as i could see. anyway, in my own words, and more perhaps taking a more extreme stance: this, like most modern high energy physics / astronomy has very little practical use because it only makes a difference at energies so extreme that they are difficult / expensive to reproduce.

HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
...so far. The thing that occurred to me as I was reading this is how different life can be depending on how much energy is cheaply/freely available. Think back to within the last century: I have more horsepower sitting in my driveway than the average small village of 100 years ago (and that's not counting the actual horses in my pasture :-) . Kilowatts of cheap electricity are available at every wall socket. How has that changed our lives? How much different would life be if gigawatts of power were available at that same wall outlet at the same cost?
- cousin_it 17y ago
  Once electric power stops being the limiting factor for home tasks, further growth doesn't change your life much. Similarly with computing power: your PC is probably idling most of the time. The interesting question is, what's the limiting factor now?
  - donaq 17y ago
    OTOH, we now have programs routinely run in homes (e.g. games) that occasionally require computing power orders of magnitude higher than what was available ten years ago. I expect that if we have orders of magnitude more power deliverable to our homes, innovative people will find uses for them.
dkimball 17y ago
On the other hand, difficult now doesn't mean difficult forever; an eighteen-wheeler would have been written off as requiring impossible amounts of energy to use, if someone had described it in the 16th Century. ("_How_ many horsepower?!") "The same day as an article on the subject" is probably a little premature for any theories about its utility, too, although I'll certainly be interested if anyone who knows what he or she is talking about with physics thinks that this could be used to build an ansible or something...
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  there's no obvious connection between this symmetry breaking (handedness) and faster than light travel. you could argue that limitations for ftl come from translational symmetry (conservation of momentum and energy), but that's not what was broken here, as far as i know.

russell 17y ago

No known practical application, but hey, it was just discovered. Besides, new physics is just plain interesting. The discussion of chirality in proteins was an analogy that just added to the confusion if you didnt know a little organic chemistry. Look up chirality in Wikipedia for a little background. A dark matter universe would be a pretty bleak place because ther would be no ordinary matter, no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no me, no you,

aarongough 17y ago
But surely dark matter would evolve complex systems the same way that normal matter has... It would probably just be very different to the things we are used to...
- Sandman 17y ago
  Nobody said anything about dark matter: We like symmetry, Dr. Kharzeev, of Brookhaven, noted, but if the symmetry between matter and antimatter had not been broken long ago, “the universe would be a very desolate place.” The reason why universe would be a very desolate place is because if there was symmetry between matter and antimatter, they would immediately annihilate themselves. Why exactly is the observable universe composed almost entirely out of matter and not antimatter is now one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics, although several hypotheses exist - some of which even propose that there is also a universe composed almost entirely out of antimatter.
  - aarongough 17y ago
    I was replying to the comment above mine... A dark matter universe would be a pretty bleak place because ther would be no ordinary matter, no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no me, no you,