Symmetry or asymmetry? When I saw these two books together I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of titles. The one book says that we exist because of asymmetry while the other says that the beauty of symmetry shapes the world. You pays your money and takes your choice. Could it be that Newton found the symmetry and quantum mechanics the asymmetry? I have just started reading both books, by Frank Close and Nobel Laureate Christopher T. Hill, so I'm not yet ready to give an opinion but I'm somehow fascinated by the possibility that they are both right. Here we go down the rabbit hole with Alice. It's like that in music too. Harmony and disharmony together in a dance. I'm listening to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" as I'm writing this. Is it not the interplay of opposites that makes the whole dance possible? Thesis, antithesis and synthesis and...
Don't think I'm gonna sort this out tonight so I'll just listen to Diana Krall and Tony Bennett. They have the world on a string.
A last word from William Blake perhaps:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
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