-5

Are there any physical systems that violate Lorentz invariance?

When I asked this question from an AI bot I got the following reply:

"Yes, there are physical systems in which Lorentz invariance is violated. These include condensed matter systems with background fields, such as those of superconductors and superfluids, and systems involving extra spatial dimensions."

But the Wikipedia article on Modern searches for Lorentz violation says

"No Lorentz violations have been measured thus far, and exceptions in which positive results were reported have been refuted or lack further confirmations."

It appears to me that the two statements disagree with each other. If so, which of them is correct? If they are both correct, how to understand this?

Qmechanic
  • 220,844
vyali
  • 382

2 Answers2

5

Both. Simply put, condensed matter physics works in a non relativistic regime. It violates Lorentz invariance because it's not a relativistic theory. Like Newton's mechanics. Those are low energy limits of fully Lorentz invariant theories, they "break" Lorentz invariance because we humans neglect relativistic effects in our calculations, not because electrons in a crystal violate Lorentz invariance. We simply do not need it in those models and so we neglect the relativistic effects. For search of Lorentz violation it's intended a search for natural phenomena that violates Lorentz invariance at relativistic energies, not models intended to work in a non relativistic regime. Those obviously are not relativistic by definition.

LolloBoldo
  • 1,906
5

Don't trust the AI on scientific claims it makes. They are very good at sounding right, but being very wrong. At this point, they're really only useful as teaching tools since if you already know the truth, they can help you develop new ways of explaining it. You can't trust them to tell you the truth on their own though.

There is physics that we do outside of the relativistic picture simply because there wouldn't be any notable corrections made by relativity and it would complicate the math, but that doesn't mean that those systems being described actually violate relativity.

Logan J. Fisher
  • 1,845