(Ebook) The Language of Symmetry by Benedict Rattigan (Editor), Denis Noble (Editor), Afiq Hatta (Editor) ISBN 9781032308494, 9781032303949, 1032308494, 1032303948, 2022041644, 2022041645

(Ebook) The Language of Symmetry by Benedict Rattigan (Editor), Denis Noble (Editor), Afiq Hatta (Editor) ISBN 9781032308494, 9781032303949, 1032308494, 1032303948, 2022041644, 2022041645

Is our world ruled by order or by disorder? It is not just abig question. It is an old question that has engaged philosophersand scientists for thousands of years. We can trace it backto ancient Greek philosophers, to Egypt’s pharaoh dynasties, toancient Chinese Taoists, and to Buddhism’s origins in India. Andit is also a question that is very relevant to life in the West today.As the team at Oxford explored symmetry in their different disciplines, we realised just how multifaceted it is. One is aware of it in musical composition as assonance and dissonance, or you might catch sight of it in biology as a transformation that leaves an object unchanged. Frequently it is elegantly simple, whilst occasionally it can be so contradictory as to be almost incomprehensible. It is both orderly and disorderly, logical and illogical, transparent and opaque. But why is symmetry so symmetrical? The conclusion we reached is this: because it conditions its own structure. Whereas all the laws of Nature are built upon certain symmetries, symmetry alone is subject to itself.In Nature’s laws, complexity never develops beyond necessity. The best designs are simple, and the best designer is Nature itself. Finding that there is a fundamental symmetry between order and disorder that can run through all our explanations is like discovering a clarification that was always waiting there to be revealed. Whereas this seems at first to be illogical, if symmetry were life’s ordering principle then it would necessarily have infinite reach and encompass everything, including itself. This would create a paradoxical universe of symmetry and asymmetry, of cosmos and chaos. Our universe, in other words, a place of infinite symmetries in which the co-existence of order and disorder is not only in evidence, it is inevitable. If symmetry has no deeper cause than itself, then the cosmos has been structured in the only way possible.