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.
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,
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.
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,
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?
"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...
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.