Breaking Lorentz symmetry
Date: Sunday, March 21, 2004 @ 16:46:22 UTC
Topic: Science
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"...Symmetry is one of the most important concepts in physics, and it is closely linked to the conservation of quantities such as energy, momentum and charge. However, symmetry breaking is also incredibly important. The breaking of electroweak symmetry, for example, is responsible for the generation of mass in the Standard Model of particle physics..."
Breaking Lorentz symmetry
Feature: March 2004
As physicists celebrate 100 years of Lorentz symmetry, some theorists and experimentalists are working hard to spoil the party
Imagine you are about to create a universe. How would you do it? As soon as you say "let there be the laws of physics" you would immediately face a problem. Do the same laws hold for everyone in your universe regardless of where they are? Or do the laws change as you move about or face in different directions? Clearly the most equitable and fair way to proceed would be to make the laws of physics the same for all observers. To a physicist such equality and fairness of physical laws is called a symmetry, and the symmetry that requires the laws of physics to be the same for all observers is known as Lorentz symmetry..."
Read the whole article at: www.physicsweb.org/article/world
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