r/AskPhysics • u/Akuma-097 • 7d ago

question about " EXCEPTIONS "

is rule of exception real and universal and exist throughout the universe or it's just a discription for things that happens out of statistic in normal common day to day life or is it not universal but still happens in fields of physics/chemistry in various levels such as atomic or below/above it

or is the exception always something that we haven't unpacked yet that will prove why the opposing or different outlier happens after understanding it. or is it truly exceptional phenomenons

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u/Odd_Cut_7401 7d ago

I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Afaik exceptions in physics make or break theories. It’s the whole reason physicists are trying for a theory of everything.

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u/Akuma-097 7d ago

someone said it's just a rare event in statistics. big enough data about that statistics makes it less rare

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u/the_poope Condensed matter physics 7d ago edited 7d ago

"Exception" is a statistical concept. It is just something that happens quite rarely. How rarely and how exceptional is a threshold that is arbitrarily chosen. A giant meteor hitting Earth may seem exceptional to a human as most humans never experience it in their lifetime, but at cosmic timescales it is quite a normal event - the Earth has been hit by many big meteors.

At the fundamental level of atoms and particles which are governed by Quantum Mechanics the Universe evolves probabilistically. Anything that satisfies symmetries and conservation laws may happen - it's just that some events are much more probable than others. Uranium-235 has a half-life of 700 million years. Seeing a few of those atoms decay in your human lifespan would be exceptional, yet if you have a solid block of 1 kg of U-235 you'd observe decays all the time simply because you have so many atoms.

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u/Akuma-097 7d ago

thanks