CHAPTER 6

BROKEN SYMMETRY

Something in the human mind is attracted to symmetry. Sym-

metry appeals to our visual sense, and thereby plays a role in
our sense of beauty. However, perfect symmetry is repetitive
and predictable, and our minds also like surprises, so we
often consider imperfect symmetry to be more beautiful than
exact mathematical symmetry. Nature, too, seems to be
attracted to symmetry, for many of the most striking patterns
in the natural world are symmetric. And nature also seems to
be dissatisfied with too much symmetry, for nearly all the
symmetric patterns in nature are less symmetric than the
causes that give rise to them.
This may seem a strange thing to say; you may recall that
the great physicist Pierre Curie, who with his wife, Marie, dis-
covered radioactivity, stated the general principle that "effects
are as symmetric as their causes." However, the world is full
of effects that are not as symmetric as their causes, and the
reason for this is a phenomenon known as "spontaneous sym-
metry breaking."
Symmetry is a mathematical concept as well as an aes-
thetic one, and it allows us to classify different types of regu-
lar pattern and distinguish between them. Symmetry breaking

71
74 NATURE'S NUMBERS

is a more dynamic idea, describing changes in pattern. Before

we can understand where nature's patterns come from and
how they can change, we must find a language in which to
describe what they are.
What is symmetry?
Let's work our way to the general from the particular. One
of the most familiar symmetric forms is the one inside which
you spend your life. The human body is "bilaterally symmet-
ric," meaning that its left half is (near enough) the same as its
right half. As noted, the bilateral symmetry of the human form
is only approximate: the heart is not central, nor are the two
sides of the face identical. But the overall form is very close to
one that has perfect symmetry, and in order to describe the
mathematics of symmetry we can imagine an idealized
human figure whose left side is exactly the same as its right
side. But exactly the same? Not entirely. The two sides of the
figure occupy different regions of space; moreover, the left
side is a reversal of the right-its mirror image.
As soon as we use words like "image," we are already
thinking of how one shape corresponds to the other-of how
you might move one shape to bring it into coincidence with
the other. Bilateral symmetry means that if you reflect the left
half in a mirror, then you obtain the right half. Reflection is a
mathematical concept, but it is not a shape, a number, or a
formula. It is a transformation-that is, a rule for moving
things around.
There are many possible transformations, but most are not
symmetries. To relate the halves correctly, the mirror must be
placed on the symmetry axis, which divides the figure into its
two related halves. Reflection then leaves the human form
invariant-that is, unchanged in appearance. So we have
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 75

found a precise mathematical characterization of bilateral

symmetry-a shape is bilaterally symmetric if it is invariant by
reflection. More generally, a symmetry of an object or system
is any transformation that leaves it invariant. This description
is a wonderful example of what I earlier called the "thingifica-
tion of processes": the process "move like this" becomes a
thing-a symmetry. This simple but elegant characterization
opens the door to an immense area of mathematics.
There are many different kinds of symmetry. The most
important ones are reflections, rotations, and translations-or,
less formally, flips, turns, and slides. If you take an object in
the plane, pick it up, and flip it over onto its back, you get the
same effect as if you had reflected it in a suitable mirror. To
find where the mirror should go, choose some point on the
original object and look at where that point ends up when the
object is flipped. The mirror must go halfway between the
point and its image, at right angles to the line that joins them
(see figure 3). Reflections can also be carried out in three-
dimensional space, but now the mirror is of a more familiar
kind-namely, a flat surface.
To rotate an object in the plane, you choose a point, called
the center, and turn the object about that center, as a wheel
turns about its hub. The number of degrees through which you
turn the object determines the "size" of the rotation. For exam-
ple, imagine a flower with four identical equally spaced petals.
If you rotate the flower 90°, it looks exactly the same, so the
transformation "rotate through a right angle" is a symmetry of
the flower. Rotations can occur in three-dimensional space
too, but now you have to choose a line, the axis, and spin
objects on that axis as the Earth spins on its axis. Again, you
can rotate objects through different angles about the same axis.
76 NATURE'S NUMBERS

OBJECT

MIRROR IMAGE

FIGURE I.
Where is the mirror? Given an object and a mirror image of that
object, choose any point of the object and the corresponding point of
the image, Join them by a line, The mirror must be at right angles to
the midpoint of that line.

Translations are transformations that slide objects along

without rotating them. Think of a tiled bathroom wall. If you
take a tile and slide it horizontally just the right distance, it
will fit on top of a neighboring tile. That distance is the width
of a tile. If you slide it two widths of a tile, or three, or any
whole number, it also fits the pattern. The same is true if you
slide it in a vertical direction, or even if you use a combina-
tion of horizontal and vertical slides. In fact, you can do more
than just sliding one tile-you can slide the entire pattern of
tiles. Again, the pattern fits neatly on top of its original posi-
tion only when you use a combination of horizontal and verti-
cal slides through distances that are whole number multiples
of the width of a tile.
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 77

Reflections capture symmetries in which the left half of a

pattern is the same as the right half, like the human body.
Rotations capture symmetries in which the same units repeat
around circles, like the petals of a flower. Translations cap-
ture symmetries in which units are repeated, like a regular
array of tiles; the bees' honeycomb, with its hexagonal "tiles,"
is an excellent naturally occurring example.
Where do the symmetries of natural patterns come from?
Think of a still pond, so flat that it can be thought of as a
mathematical plane, and large enough that it might as well
be a plane for all that the edges matter. Toss a pebble into
the pond. You see patterns, ripples, circular waves seem-
ingly moving outward away from the point of impact of the
pebble. We've all seen this, and nobody is greatly surprised.
After all, we saw the cause: it was the pebble. If you don't
throw pebbles in, or anything else that might disturb the sur-
face, then you won't get waves. All you'll get is a still, flat,
planar pond.
Ripples on a pond are examples of broken symmetry. An
ideal mathematical plane has a huge amount of symmetry:
every part of it is identical to every other part. You can trans-
late the plane through any distance in any direction, rotate it
through any angle about any center, reflect it in any mirror
line, and it still looks exactly the same. The pattern of circular
ripples, in contrast, has less symmetry. It is symmetric only
with respect to rotations about the point of impact of the peb-
ble, and reflections in mirror lines that run through that point.
No translations, no other rotations, no other reflections. The
pebble breaks the symmetry of the plane, in the sense that
after the pebble has disturbed the pond, many of its symme-
tries are lost. But not all, and that's why we see a pattern.
78 NATURE'S NUMBERS

However, none of this is surprising, because of the pebble,

In fact, since the impact of the pebble creates a special point,
different from all the others, the symmetries of the ripples are
exactly what you would expect. They are precisely the sym-
metries that do not move that special point. So the symmetry
of the pond is not spontaneously broken when the ripples
appear, because you can detect the stone that causes the trans-
lational symmetries to be lost.
You would be more surprised-a lot more surprised-if a
perfectly flat pond suddenly developed a series of concentric
circular ripples without there being any obvious cause, You
would imagine that perhaps a fish beneath the surface had
disturbed it, or that something had fallen in and you had not
seen it because it was moving too fast. So strong is the
ingrained assumption that patterns must have evident causes
that when in 1958 the Russian chemist B. P. Belousov discov-
ered a chemical reaction that spontaneously formed patterns,
apparently out of nothing, his colleagues refused to believe
him. They assumed that he had made a mistake. They didn't
bother checking his work: he was so obviously wrong that
checking his work would be a waste of time.
Which was a pity, because he was right.
The particular pattern that Belousov discovered existed
not in space but in time: his reaction oscillated through a
periodic sequence of chemical changes. By 1963, another
Russian chemist, A. M. Zhabotinskii, had modified Be-
lousov's reaction so that it formed patterns in space as well.
In their honor, any similar chemical reaction is given the
generic name "Belousov-Zhabotinskii [or B-ZJ reaction." The
chemicals used nowadays are different and simpler, thanks to
some refinements made by the British reproductive biologist
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 79

Jack Cohen and the American mathematical biologist Arthur

Winfree, and the experiment is now so simple that it can be
done by anyone with access to the necessary chemicals. These
are slightly esoteric, but there are only four of them.'
In the absence of the appropriate apparatus, I'll tell you
what happens if you do the experiment. The chemicals are all
liquids: you mix them together in the right order and pour
them into a flat dish. The mixture turns blue, then red: let it
stand for a while. For ten or sometimes even twenty minutes,
nothing happens; it's just like gazing at a featureless flat
pond-except that it is the color of the liquid that is feature-
less, a uniform red. This uniformity is not surprising; after all,
you blended the liquids. Then you notice a few tiny blue
spots appearing-and that is a surprise. They spread, forming
circular blue disks. Inside each disk, a red spot appears, turn-
ing the disk into a blue ring with a red center. Both the blue
ring and the red disk grow, and when the red disk gets big
enough, a blue spot appears inside it. The process continues,
forming an ever-growing series of "target patterns"-concen-
tric rings of red and blue. These target patterns have exactly
the same symmetries as the rings of ripples on a pond; but
this time you can't see any pebble. It is a strange and mysteri-
ous process in which paUern-order-appears to arise of its
own accord from the disordered, randomly mixed liquid. No
wonder the chemists didn't believe Belousov.
But that's not the end of the B-Z reaction's party tricks. If
you tilt the dish slightly and then put it back where it was, or
dip a hot wire into it, you can break the rings and turn them

'The precise recipe is given in the Notes to The Collapse of Chaos, by Jack
Cohen and Ian Stewart.
80 NATURE'S NUMBERS

into rotating red and blue spirals, If Belousov had claimed

that, you would have seen steam coming out of his col-
leagues' ears,
This kind of behavior is not just a chemical conjuring
trick. The regular beating of your heart relies on exactly the
same patterns, but in that case they are patterns in waves of
electrical activity, Your heart is not just a lump of undifferen-
tiated muscle tissue, and it doesn't automatically contract all
at once, Instead, it is composed of millions of tiny muscle
fibers, each one of them a single cell. The fibers contract in
response to electrical and chemical signals, and they pass
those signals on to their neighbors, The problem is to make
sure that they all contract roughly in synchrony, so that the
heart beats as a whole, To achieve the necessary degree of
synchronization, your brain sends electrical signals to your
heart. These signals trigger electrical changes in some of the
muscle fibers, which then affect the muscle fibers next to
them-so that ripples of activity spread, just like the ripples
on a pond or the blue disks in the B-Z reaction. As long as the
waves form complete rings, the heart's muscle fibers contract
in synchrony and the heart beats normally. But if the waves
become spirals-as they can do in diseased hearts-the result
is an incoherent set of local contractions, and the heart fibril-
lates. If fibrillation goes unchecked for more than a few min-
utes, it results in death. So every single one of us has a vested
interest in circular and spiral wave patterns.
However in the heart, as in the pond, we can see a specific
cause for the wave patterns: the signals from the brain. In the
B-Z reaction, we cannot: the symmetry breaks sponta-
neously-"of its own accord"-without any external stimu-
lus. The term "spontaneous" does not imply that there is no
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 81

cause, however: it indicates that the cause can be as tiny and

as insignificant as you please. Mathematically, the crucial
point is that the uniform distribution of chemicals-the fea-
tureless red liquid-is unstable. If the chemicals cease to be
equally mixed, then the delicate balance that keeps the solu-
tion red is upset, and the resulting chemical changes trigger
the formation of a blue spot. From that moment on, the whole
process becomes much more comprehensible, because now
the blue spot acts like a chemical "pebble," creating sequen-
tial ripples of chemical activity. But-at least, as far as the
mathematics goes-the imperfection in the symmetry of the
liquid which triggers the blue spot can be vanishingly small,
provided it is not zero. In a real liquid, there are always tiny
bits of dust, or bubbles-or even just molecules undergoing
the vibrations we call "heat"-to disturb the perfect symme-
try. That's all it takes. An infinitesimal cause produces a
large-scale effect, and that effect is a symmetric pattern.
Nature's symmetries can be found on every scale, from the
structure of subatomic particles to that of the entire universe.
Many chemical molecules are symmetric. The methane mole-
cule is a tetrahedron-a triangular-sided pyramid-with one
carbon atom at its center and four hydrogen atoms at its corners.
Benzene has the sixfold symmetry of a regular hexagon. The
fashionable molecule buckminsterfullerene is a truncated icosa-
hedral cage of sixty carbon atoms. (An icosahedron is a regular
solid with twenty triangular faces; "truncated" means that the
corners are cut off.) Its symmetry lends it a remarkable stability,
which has opened up new possibilities for organic chemistry.
On a slightly larger scale than molecules, we find symme-
tries in cellular structure; at the heart of cellular replication
lies a tiny piece of mechanical engineering. Deep within each
82 NATURE'S NUMBERS

living cell, there is a rather shapeless structure known as the

centrosome, which sprouts long thin microtubules, basic
components of the cell's internal "skeleton," like a diminu-
tive sea urchin. Centro somes were first discovered in 1887
and play an important role in organizing cell division. How-
ever, in one respect the structure of the centrosome is aston-
ishingly symmetric. Inside it are two structures, known as
centrioles, positioned at right angles to each other. Each cen-
triole is cylindrical, made from twenty-seven microtubules
fused together along their lengths in threes, and arranged with
perfect ninefold symmetry. The microtubules themselves also
have an astonishingly regular symmetric form. They are hol-
low tubes, made from a perfect regular checkerboard pattern
of units that contain two distinct proteins, alpha- and beta-
tubulin. One day, perhaps, we will understand why nature
chose these symmetric forms. But it is amazing to see sym-
metric structures at the core of a living cell.
Viruses are often symmetric, too, the commonest shapes
being helices and icosahedrons. The helix is the form of the
influenza virus, for instance. Nature prefers the icosahedron
above all other viral forms: examples include herpes, chicken-
pox, human wart, canine infectious hepatitis, turnip yellow
mosaic, adenovirus, and many others. The adenovirus is
another striking example of the artistry of molecular engineer-
ing. It is made from 252 virtually identical subunits, with 21
of them, fitted together like billiard balls before the break,
making up each triangular face. (Subunits along the edges lie
on more than one face and corner units lie on three, which is
why 20 x 21 is not equal to 252.)
Nature exhibits symmetries on larger scales, too. A devel-
oping frog embryo begins life as a spherical cell, then loses
 BROKEN SYMMETRY .1

symmetry step by step as it divides, until it has become a

blastula, thousands of tiny cells whose overall form is again
spherical. Then the blastula begins to engulf part of itself, in
the process known as gastrulation. During the early stages of
this collapse, the embryo has rotational symmetry about an
axis, whose position is often determined by the initial distri-
bution of yolk in the egg, or sometimes by the point of sperm
entry. Later this symmetry is broken, and only a single mirror
symmetry is retained, leading to the bilateral symmetry of the
adult.
Volcanoes are conical, stars are spherical, galaxies are spi-
ral or elliptical. According to some cosmologists, the universe
itself resembles nothing so much as a gigantic expanding ball.
Any understanding of nature must include an understanding
of these prevalent patterns. It must explain why they are so
common, and why many different aspects of nature show the
same patterns. Raindrops and stars are spheres, whirlpools
and galaxies are spirals, honeycombs and the Devil's Cause-
way are arrays of hexagons. There has to be a general princi-
ple underlying such patterns; it is not enough just to study
each example in isolation and explain it in terms of its own
internal mechanisms.
Symmetry breaking is just such a principle.
But in order for symmetry to break, it has to be present to
start with. At first this would seem to replace one problem of
pattern formation with another: before we can explain the cir-
cular rings on the pond, in other words, we have to explain
the pond. But there is a crucial difference between the rings
and the pond. The symmetry of the pond is so extensive-
every point on its surface being equivalent to every other-
that we do not recognize it as being a pattern. Instead, we see
84 NATURE'S NUMBERS

it as bland uniformity. It is very easy to explain bland unifor-

mity: it is what happens to systems when there is no reason
for their component parts to differ from each other. It is, so to
speak, nature's default option. If something is symmetric, its
component features are replaceable or interchangeable. One
corner of a square looks pretty much the same as any other, so
we can interchange the corners without altering the square's
appearance. One atom of hydrogen in methane looks pretty
much like any other, so we can interchange those atoms. One
region of stars in a galaxy looks pretty much like any other, so
we can interchange parts of two different spiral arms without
making an important difference.
In short, nature is symmetric because we live in a mass-
produced universe-analogous to the surface of a pond. Every
electron is exactly the same as every other electron, every pro-
ton is exactly the same as every other proton, every region of
empty space is exactly the same as every other region of
empty space, every instant of time is exactly the same as
every other instant of time. And not only are the structure of
space, time, and matter the same everywhere: so are the laws
that govern them. Albert Einstein made such "invariance
principles" the cornerstone of his approach to physics; he
based his thinking on the idea that no particular point in
spacetime is special. Among other things, this led him to the
principle of relativity, one of the greatest physical discoveries
ever made.
This is all very well, but it produces a deep paradox. If the
laws of physics are the same at all places and at all times, why
is there any "interesting" structure in the universe at all?
Should it not be homogeneous and changeless? If every place
in the universe were interchangeable with every other place,
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 8S

then all places would be indistinguishable; and the same

would hold for all times. But they are not. The problem is, if
anything, made worse by the cosmological theory that the
universe began as a single point, which exploded from noth-
ingness billions of years ago in the big bang. At the instant of
the universe's formation, all places and all times were not
only indistinguishable but identical. So why are they differ-
ent now?
The answer is the failure of Curie's Principle, noted at the
start of this chapter. Unless that principle is hedged around
with some very subtle caveats about arbitrarily tiny causes, it
offers a misleading intuition about how a symmetric system
should behave. Its prediction that adult frogs should be bilat-
erally symmetric (because embryonic frogs are bilaterally
symmetric, and according to Curie's Principle the symmetry
cannot change) appears at first sight to be a great success; but
the same argument applied at the spherical blastula stage pre-
dicts with equal force that an adult frog should be a sphere.
A much better principle is the exact opposite, the princi-
ple of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Symmetric causes
often produce less symmetric effects. The evolving universe
can break the initial symmetries of the big bang. The spherical
blastula can develop into the bilateral frog. The 252 perfectly
interchangeable units of adenovirus can arrange themselves
into an icosahedron-an arrangement in which some units
will occupy special places, such as corners. A set of twenty-
seven perfectly ordinary microtubules can get together to cre-
ate a centriole.
Fine, but why patterns? Why not a structureless mess, in
which all symmetries are broken? One of the strongest threads
that runs through every study ever made of symmetry break-
.6 NATURE'S NUMBERS

ing is that the mathematics does not work this way. Symme-
tries break reluctantly. There is so much symmetry lying
around in our mass-produced universe that there is seldom a
good reason to break all of it. So rather a lot survives. Even
those symmetries that do get broken are still present, in a
sense, but now as potential rather than actual form. For exam-
ple, when the 252 units of the adenovirus began to link up,
anyone of them could have ended up in a particular comer.
In that sense, they are interchangeable. But only one of them
actually does end up there, and in that sense the symmetry is
broken: they are no longer fully interchangeable. But some of
the symmetry remains, and we see an icosahedron.
In this view, the symmetries we observe in nature are bro-
ken traces of the grand, universal symmetries of our mass-
produced universe. Potentially the universe could exist in any
of a huge symmetric system of possible states, but actually it
must select one of them. In so doing, it must trade some of its
actual symmetry for unobservable, potential symmetry. But
some of the actual symmetry may remain, and when it does
we observe a pattern. Most of nature's symmetric patterns
arise out of some version of this general mechanism.
In a negative sort of way, this rehabilitates Curie's Princi-
ple: if we permit tiny asymmetric disturbances, which can
trigger an instability of the fully symmetric state, then our
mathematical system is no longer perfectly symmetric. But
the important point is that the tinest departure from symme-
try in the cause can lead to a total loss of symmetry in the
resulting effect-and there are always tiny departures. That
makes Curie's principle useless for the prediction of symme-
tries. It is much more informative to model a real system after
one with perfect symmetry, but to remember that such a
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 87

model has many possible states, only one of which will be

realized in practice. Small disturbances cause the real system
to select states from the range available to the idealized per-
fect system. Today this approach to the behavior of symmetric
systems provides one of the main sources of understanding of
the general principles of pattern formation.
In particular, the mathematics of symmetry breaking uni-
fies what at first sight appear to be very disparate phenomena.
For example, think about the patterns in sand dunes men-
tioned in chapter 1. The desert can be modeled as a flat plane
of sandy particles, the wind can be modeled as a fluid flowing
across the plane. By thinking about the symmetries of such a
system, and how they can break, many of the observed pat-
terns of dunes can be deduced. For example, suppose the
wind blows steadily in a fixed direction, so that the whole
system is invariant under translations parallel to the wind.
One way to break these translational symmetries is to create a
periodic pattern of parallel stripes, at right angles to the wind
direction. But this is the pattern that geologists call transverse
dunes. If the pattern also becomes periodic in the direction
along the stripes, then more symmetry breaks, and the wavy
barchanoid ridges appear. And so on.
However, the mathematical principles of symmetry-break-
ing do not just work for sand dunes. They work for any sys-
tem with the same symmetries-anything that flows across a
planar surface creating patterns. You can apply the same basic
model to a muddy river flowing across a coastal plain and
depositing sediment, or the waters of a shallow sea in ebb and
flow across the seabed-phenomena important in geology,
because millions of years later the patterns that result have
been frozen into the rock that the sandy seabed and the
88 NATURE'S NUMBERS

muddy delta became. The list of patterns is identical to that

for dunes.
Or the fluid might be a liquid crystal, as found in digital-
watch displays, which consist of a lot of long thin molecules
that arrange themselves in patterns under the influence of a
magnetic or electric field. Again, you find the same patterns.
Or there might not be a fluid at all: maybe what moves is a
chemical, diffusing through tissue and laying down genetic
instructions for patterns on the skin of a developing animal.
Now the analogue of transverse dunes is the stripes of a tiger
or a zebra, and that of barchanoid ridges is the spots on a
leopard or a hyena.
The same abstract mathematics; different physical and bio-
logical realizations. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology
transfer-but with mental technology, ways of thinking, being
transferred, rather than machines. This universality of sym-
metry breaking explains why living systems and nonliving
ones have many patterns in common. Life itself is a process of
symmetry creation-of replication; the universe of biology is
just as mass-produced as the universe of physics, and the
organic world therefore exhibits many of the patterns found
in the inorganic world. The most obvious symmetries of liv-
ing organisms are those of form-icosahedral viruses, the spi-
ral shell of Nautilus, the helical horns of gazelles, the remark-
able rotational symmetries of starfish and jellyfish and
flowers. But symmetries in the living world go beyond form
into behavior-and not just the symmetric rhythms of loco-
motion I mentioned earlier. The territories of fish in Lake
Huron are arranged just like the cells in a honeycomb-and
for the same reasons. The territories, like the bee grubs, can-
not all be in the same place-which is what perfect symmetry
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 89

would imply. Instead, they pack themselves as tightly as they

can without one being different from another, and the behav-
ioral constraint by itself produces a hexagonally symmetric
tiling. And that resembles yet another striking instance of
mathematical technology transfer, for the same symmetry
breaking mechanism arranges the atoms of a crystal into a reg-
ular lattice-a physical process that ultimately supports
Kepler's theory of the snowflake.
One of the more puzzling types of symmetry in nature is
mirror symmetry, symmetry with respect to a reflection. Mir-
ror symmetries of three-dimensional objects cannot be real-
ized by turning the objects in space-a left shoe cannot be
turned into a right shoe by rotating it. However, the laws of
physics are very nearly mirror-symmetric, the exceptions
being certain interactions of subatomic particles. As a result,
any molecule that is not mirror-symmetric potentially exists
in two different forms-left- and right-handed, so to speak.
On Earth, life has selected a particular molecular handedness:
for example, for amino acids. Where does this particular
handedness of terrestrial life come from? It could have been
just an accident-primeval chance propagated by the mass-
production techniques of replication. If so, we might imagine
that on some distant planet, creatures exist whose molecules
are mirror images of ours. On the other hand, there may be a
deep reason for life everywhere to choose the same direction.
Physicists currently recognize four fundamental forces in
nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak
nuclear interactions. It is known that the weak force violates
mirror symmetry-that is, it behaves differently in left- or
right-handed versions of the same physical problem. As the
Austrian-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli put it, "The Lord is a
90 NATURE'S NUMBERS

weak left-hander." One remarkable consequence of this viola-

tion of mirror symmetry is the fact that the energy levels of
molecules and that of their mirror images are not exactly
equal. The effect is extremely small: the difference in energy
levels between one particular amino acid and its mirror image
is roughly one part in 10 17 • This may seem very tiny-but we
saw that symmetry breaking requires only a very tiny distur-
bance. In general, lower-energy forms of molecules should be
favored in nature. For this amino acid, it can be calculated
that with 98% probability the lower energy form will become
dominant within a period of about a hundred thousand years.
And indeed, the version of this amino acid which is found in
living organisms is the lower-energy one.
In chapter 5, I mentioned the curious symmetry of
Maxwell's equations relating electricity and magnetism.
Roughly speaking, if you interchange all the symbols for the
electric field with those for the magnetic field, you re-create
the same equations. This symmetry lies behind Maxwell's
unification of electrical and magnetic forces into a single elec-
tromagnetic force. There is an analogous symmetry-though
an imperfect one-in the equations for the four basic forces of
nature, suggesting an even grander unification: that all four
forces are different aspects of the same thing. Physicists have
already achieved a unification of the weak and electromag-
netic forces. According to current theories, all four fundamen-
tal forces should become unified-that is, symmetrically
related-at the very high energy levels prevailing in the early
universe. This symmetry of the early universe is broken in our
own universe. In short, there is an ideal mathematical uni-
verse in which all of the fundamental forces are related in a
perfectly symmetric manner-but we don't live in it.
 BROKEN SYMMETRY 91

That means that our universe could have been different; it

could have been any of the other universes that, potentially,
could arise by breaking symmetry in a different way. That's
quite a thought. But there is an even more intriguing thought:
the same basic method of pattern formation, the same mecha-
nism of symmetry breaking in a mass-produced universe, gov-
erns the cosmos, the atom, and us.