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Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry

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Frank Close has already provided several popular science standards, and in his new book takes us on a guided tour of modern science, following a theme whose study started early in 19th century: the fascination and appeal of the underlying symmetry of Nature, and its attendant asymmetry. First the author reviews symmetry at large, with examples taken from everyday life. One of the enigmas dealt with is my own favourite, Martin Gardner's puzzle: why does a mirror invert left and right, but not top and bottom? Here the author adds much of his own insight and wit ('the muscles which close a mouth are stronger than those which open it - as is well-known to all who have sat in committees'). The result is a fascinating panorama, down to the molecular level, of the asymmetries around us. Life, intrinsically related to asymmetries, is the theme of this book, and the author revisits what has already been written on this theme, offering us an absorbing, lively and scientifically correct account of symmetry and its deep implications.

Yves Sacquin /Saclay

The author beautifully narrates to laypersons how broken symmetry, i.e., asymmetry born from symmetry is important in the natural world for the existence of life, molecules, atoms and elementary particles. The riddle of the symmetry associated with the last of these items when the universe was created is yet to be solved in the near future. At the end of the book, the reader will be surprised to learn that Pasteur anticipated the importance of asymmetry in 1860. In an early chapter the author writes about the moderately well-known teaser "Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not top and bottom?" His answer to this is astonishingly simple. However, he should have been careful to give a more educational answer that includes the explanation for the reversal of the left- and right-handedness in mirrors, because he describes about "mirror asymmetric" left-handed and right-handed molecules, right-handedness of DNA and left-handedness of "the mirror DNA," etc. in a later chapter. [The latest academic articles on the mirror reversal problem can be found in M. C. Corballis, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 163-169 (2000) and T. Tabata and S. Okuda, ibid. pp. 170-173 (2000).] This book would also be interesting for scientists to learn how they can talk well about scientific topics to laypersons. It would have been much better for the book to include a bibliography for citations and further reading.

The book is extremely well written, fascinating, and easy to read. But the best part is the little errata sheet that comes with the book that may make it a collector's item. There is a drawing in the book of the Tullieries Garden in Paris meant to show the symmetry humans wish to achieve. The drawing has an error that breaks the symmetry, just like the one headless Lucifer statue in the Garden broke the symmetry when the author visited it, giving him a starting point for this book. The errata sheet attempts to restore the symmetry with a new drawing, but the irony has already made its point; human attempts at symmetry are doomed to fail in an asymmetric universe.

Before I start to criticise "Lucifer's Legacy", I should add that I am a trained physicist, and wanted to brush up a bit about ideas of symmetry/asymmetry, which have become essential to our quest to explain the physics of the universe. Having clarified this, I must say the first part of this book was a real disappointment: it seems to be intended for people who have not heard much about physics since they left high school. There are some nice detours about the history of physics about the turn of the century. But apart from that, the book often is annoyingly trivial. Towards the end it gets more interesting, and some ideas about symmetry and symmetry breaking are nicely presented. But if you look for more than light bedtime reading, look somewhere else.

The world is full of symmetries, broken and unbroken, according to _Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry_ (Oxford University Press) by Frank Close. It may be that disrupted symmetries are essential for our very being, and experiments planned for this decade may give us an answer about this. The world of subatomic particles and basic forces is very weird, and so Close spends much of his book discussing symmetries that are a bit easier to understand. For instance, human bodies are mostly symmetric on the outside, but there are interesting exceptions to this rule. Some molecules come in left and right handed forms, and our own molecules are of the left form, as are most biological molecules. (It makes a difference; the molecule limone comes in right and left forms, too, and we can tell the difference: one smells like lemons and one like oranges.) Close tells us why mirrors reverse right and left but not up and down (they don't, really) and why bathtubs drain in different directions in different hemispheres (they don't, really).

Symmetry can break up for all sorts of reasons. Billions of years ago in the Big Bang, for instance, there was equal matter and antimatter. For some reason, as far as we know, matter prevailed. Why? Are there packets of antimatter galaxies in the universe that are buffered from us by light years of separation? How did the asymmetric increase of matter over antimatter come to be? Why is there more matter, and when it comes down to it, why is there anything?

These are questions that the newest generation of particle accelerators will be trying to tackle in the next decade. Close's book does a good job of examining these confusing issues and trying to make some sort of sense of them for the layman. He has a gift for the felicitous metaphor, and his writing on strange subjects is clear.

This book is a pleasant, painless introduction to particle physics and the applications of symmetry in the universe. I could see how it might annoy an experienced physicist with entire chapters full of metaphors and analogies intended to solidify the reader's understanding of the concepts, but for a beginner these are quite helpful. It also includes a long and detailed history of the major discoveries in atomic physics, which is a tiny bit too long, but still informative and well written. I am a junior in high school, and I enjoyed this book immensely.

This is popular science on steroids, taking the lay reader up to the boundaries of comprehension, but not beyond. Frank Close has done a terrific job of explaining exactly how many of the neat coincidences we see around us (weights of subatomic particles, strengths of atomic forces, etc.) are in fact coincidences (not many, is Close's guess) and how many are in fact necessary for matter to exist in its current condition (a good number). Many of these questions should be answered in the next few years; it will be interesting to see how well Close did.