Asymmetric Quotes and Videos
Plus links to related articles—
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.” Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry follows the trail.
“That the universe is lopsided appears to be critical for our existence. It is also perhaps the greatest of the outstanding mysteries.”
“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.”
Quotes from Time Reborn, 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.”
River of Asymmetry 