“Self-Accelerating Particle” by Solomon M.
It seems that Newton's unbreakable law has been broken... or at least bent. Inside the labs at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology (M.I.T.), there was discovery of a subatomic particle, which could accelerate to near light speeds without any external force acting upon it. This seems to break Newton's First Law of Motion, but this is not the case, even though the particle is accelerating on its own.
"It turns out that this self-acceleration does not actually violate any physical laws — such as the conservation of momentum — because at the same time the particle is accelerating, it is also spreading out spatially in the opposite direction" (Chandler). The particle is not only going forward at an increasing speed but also in the exact opposite direction at the same speed. It is essentially stretching in the opposite direction, which means that the particle, though seemingly doing the impossible, is actually doing something completely possible. Scientists have the particle speed up like this by changing its basic properties that make it an electron, or photon, or whatever particle they use.
This phenomenon can be accomplished by changing the wave structure of an electron. The Dirac equations of basic quantum physics describe basic fundamental particles in terms of wave structure. Considering the phenomenon that higher speeds force, time literally slows down for the thing going at such speeds, which could allow for extreme preservation of matter. This can preserve things such as unstable compounds that break down in a manner of milliseconds (Kaminer).
But this discovery is still new and not a lot is known about how it could have any other practical use. Though our knowledge of this discovery is still in its infancy, this is a very interesting phenomenon that has the potential for something amazing.
Works Cited
Chandler, David L. "Particles Accelerate Without a Push." MIT News. MIT News,
20 Jan. 2015. Web. 01 Dec. 2015.
<http://news.mit.edu/2015/selfaccelerating- particles-0120>
Kaminer, Ido. "Self-accelerating Dirac Particles and Prolonging the Lifetime of
Relativistic Fermions." Nature Physics. N.p., 14 May 2014. Web.
1 Dec. 2015.
<http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v11/n3/full/nphys3196.html>.