Carbon Based  16 notes     Parity was long thought to be a
fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the
universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of
physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates.
In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force,
which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the
parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together
subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity,
at least under normal circumstances.  Now this law appears to
have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists,
including Jack Sandweiss, Yale’s Donner Professor of Physics.
Since 2000, Sandweiss has been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms
together as part of the STAR experiment at RHIC, a 2.4-mile-
circumference particle accelerator, to study the law of parity
under the resulting extreme conditions.  The team created
something called a quark-gluon plasma — a kind of “soup” that
results when energies reach high eno