Rosen - Symmetry Rules - How Science and Nature Are Founded on Symmetry (Springer, 2008).pdf - PHYSICS - sigebryht

Joe Rosen

SYMMETRY

RULES

How Science and Nature Are

Founded on Symmetry

With 86 Figures and 4 Tables

123

Dr. Joe Rosen

338 New Mark Esplanade

Rockville, MD 20850-2734, USA

e-mail: joerosen@mailaps.org

Series Editors:

Avsha lom C. El itzur

Bar-Ilan University,

Unit of Interdisciplinary Studies,

52900 Ramat-Gan, Israel

email: avshalom.elitzur@weizmann.ac.il

Mark P. Silverman

Department of Physics, Trinity College,

Hartford, CT 06106, USA

email: mark.silverman@trincoll.edu

Jack Tuszynski

University of Alberta,

Department of Physics, Edmonton, AB,

T6G 2J1, Canada

email: jtus@phys.ualberta.ca

Rüdiger Vaas

University of Gießen,

Center for Philosophy and Foundations of Science

35394 Gießen, Germany

email: Ruediger.Vaas@t-online.de

H. Dieter Zeh

University of Heidelberg,

Institute of Theoretical Physics,

Philosophenweg 19,

69120 Heidelberg, Germany

email: zeh@uni-heidelberg.de

Cover ﬁgure : Image courtesy of the Scientiﬁc Computing and Imaging Institute,

University of Utah (www.sci.utah.edu).

ISBN 978-3-540-75972-0

DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-75973-7

e-ISBN 978-3-540-75973-7

Frontiers Collection ISSN 1612-3018

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007941509

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For Mi ra

Preface

Ernest Rutherford (New Zealand–British physicist, 1871–1937), the

1908 Nobel Laureate who discovered the existence of atomic nuclei,

is famously quoted as having said: “Physics is the only real science.

All the rest is butterﬂy collecting.” Or something to that eﬀect. I like

to include this quote in my introductory remarks at the ﬁrst class

meetings of the physics courses I teach.

I have seen that there are those who interpret this as a put-down of

amateurs (butterﬂy collectors) in science. However, my own interpre-

tation of Rutherford’s statement is that he is claiming that, except for

physics, all of the rest of science is involved merely in collecting facts

and classifying them (butterﬂy collecting). It is physics, unique among

the sciences, that is attempting to ﬁnd explanations for the classiﬁed

data.

The periodic table of the chemical elements, originally proposed by

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (Russian chemist, 1834–1907), presents an

example of this. Chemists toiled to discover the chemical elements and

their properties and then classiﬁed the elements in the scheme that

is expressed by the periodic table. Here was the chemists’ butterﬂy

collecting. It took physicists to explain theperiodictablebymeansof

quantum theory.

Rutherford’s assessment of science might well have held a large de-

gree of validity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But since then

other ﬁelds of science than physics have developed ‘physics envy’ and

they too are now busy searching for explanations. For example, chem-

istry ﬁnds its explanations in physics. And explanations in biology

are found, on one level, in evolution theory and, on another level, in

chemistry and physics.

VIII Preface

I diﬀer with Rutherford, though, in his narrow conception of sci-

ence. To be sure, science involves searching for explanations. But pro-

duction and collection of data through experimentation and observa-

tion and classiﬁcation of the data supply the raw material for science

to attempt to explain. Without them there would be nothing to ex-

plain and no ‘real science’ in Rutherford’s sense. So I include butterﬂy

collecting in my broad conception of science.

The point of all that, for the purpose of this book, is to lead to the

notion that science – even in its broad conception – not only makes

much use of symmetry, but is essentially and fundamentally based

on symmetry. Indeed, science rests ﬁrmly on the triple foundation of

reproducibility, predictability, and reduction, all of which are symme-

tries, with additional support from analogy and objectivity, which are

symmetries too. So it is not much of an exaggeration to claim that sci-

ence is symmetry. Or perhaps in somewhat more detail, science is our

view of nature through symmetry spectacles. That is one component

of the main thesis of this book.

In addition to an exposition and justiﬁcation of this central idea,

that science is founded on symmetry, we also look into how symmetry

is used in science in general and in physics in particular (Rutherford’s

‘real science’). And we ﬁnd: symmetry of evolution (symmetry of the

laws of nature), symmetry of states of physical systems, gauge sym-

metry of the fundamental interactions, and the symmetry inherent to

quantum theory. So not only do we view nature through symmetry

spectacles, but we understand nature in the language of symmetry.

That is another component of this book’s main thesis.

All that leads to deep questions that await clariﬁcation. What is

the source of all this symmetry? What is nature telling us? Is nature

symmetry, at least in some sense? If not at the level that physics

is presently investigating, are deeper levels of reality involved with

symmetry in a very major way? Or even, will symmetry turn out

to be what those fundamental levels are all about? Is symmetry the

foundational principle of the Universe?

Such ideas lurk in the back of many physicists’ minds, and some

physicists express them outrightly. Brian Greene, for one, states in

Chap. 8 of [1]: “From our modern perspective, symmetries are the

foundation from which laws spring.” And Stenger [2] adds his vote.

Speaking of the Universe, it is shown in this book that the Universe

cannot possess exact symmetry. This connects to conceptual problems

with symmetry breaking at ‘phase transitions’ in the evolution of the

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