Quotes and Videos on Asymmetry
Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang
The standard story of the birth of the cosmos goes something like this: Nearly 14 billion years ago, a tremendous amount of energy materialized as if from nowhere… That theory, which textbooks call inflation, matches all observations to date and is preferred by most cosmologists. But it has conceptual implications that some find disturbing… To critics, inflation predicts everything, which means it ultimately predicts nothing. “Inflation doesn’t work as it was intended to work,” said Paul Steinhardt, an architect of inflation who has become one of its most prominent critics.
Quotes from Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry, by Frank Close, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford:
“For many centuries scientists have investigated the ‘fearful symmetry’ that seemed to underlie the Universe. But increasingly, it looks as though life is the result of cosmic asymmetry, and scientists are now preparing to uncover the asymmetries at the heart of the Big Bang.”
“If nature should turn out not to respect this symmetry, then everything that we understand, our theories, and the sum of all experience would require us to go back to the drawing-board.”
“Symmetry is fascinating and appealing; scientists seek it in their data and incorporate it in their theories, ironically even when there is no immediate evidence for it. Perhaps the most arcane example of this concerns the nature of matter and the fabric of existence embodied in the current cosmophysical description of Creation…
“The deeper one looks, the more asymmetry becomes apparent and seemingly necessary for anything ‘useful’ to have emerged. Without asymmetry and structure, the universe would have been bland. Have we convinced ourselves that the Creation was perfect on nothing more than wish fulfillment, as evidence of imperfection and asymmetry is all around us and even within us? I wonder whether … philosophers and scientists have created a quasi-religious parable of symmetry that is obscuring the real explanation.”
“Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture by Professor Frank Close OBE, University of Oxford. Modern scientific theory describes a perfectly symmetrical universe. A universe in which matter is destroyed within an instant of its appearance and where nothing we now know could ever have happened. Human life itself seems to be lopsided, as the spherical embryo is transformed into a highly structured being with its internal organs mirrored asymmetrically. This talk explores the profound role of asymmetry in nature, and the role of its agent – the Higgs Boson – in creating a universe fit for life. The Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize is awarded annually to the scientist or engineer whose expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms is exemplary. Professor Frank Close OBE was presented the award for his excellence in science communication. 6:30 pm — 7:30 pm on Tuesday 28 January 2014 at The Royal Society, London.” –https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2014/asymmetric-universe/
Quotes from Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, by Prof. Lee Smolin, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics:
“The timeless view of physics … has shown its impotence… But if we embrace the reality of time, we make possible a time-asymmetric physics within which the universe can naturally evolve complexity and structure. And thus we avoid the paradox of an improbable universe.”
“A major test of theories of the early universe is to account for the patterns seen in the cosmic microwave background (CMB).”
“[Leibniz’s] principle of the identity of the indiscernibles requires that there cannot be two events in spacetime that have exactly the same observable properties . . . This implies that our universe can have no exact symmetries. In fact it doesn’t . . . Whereas symmetries are helpful for the analysis of models of small parts of the universe, all the symmetries so far posited by physicists have turned out to be approximate or broken.”
“From the perspective of the reality of time, it is entirely natural that the universe and its fundamental laws be asymmetric in time, with a strong arrow of time that encompasses increases of entropy for isolated systems together with continual growth of structure and complexity.”
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River of Asymmetry 