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If we still have any illusions left about the symmetric arrangement of the world, the world-view of physics will be enough to demolish them. The investigation of periodic phenomena briefly raised our hopes that the world might be arranged in a harmonic fashion. A deeper awareness of the physical structure of matter and its laws of motion questions the faith we have placed in the supremacy of symmetry. Is it possible that our belief in the beautiful, harmonious order of the cosmos was just an illusion, after all?

Alice’s worries about the gastronomic value of Looking-glass milk were not so unfounded, after all! Taking a look into the microworld of the physical , we can have been convinced that the world is fundamentally not mirror symmetric. Before we begin to judge the consequences of this, let us also take a look at the physical . Events in the material world tend towards lessening differences. A hot and a cold body that touch each other are not going to interact in such a way that the colder gives heat to the hotter one and cools down even further, while the hotter one takes on heat and heats up even more. The majority of physical processes have a direction, and this direction cannot be reversed.

We have seen that the history of the evolution of matter is, in both the inanimate and living worlds, the history of a series of symmetry breakings. The chiral molecules built into the fundamental cornerstones of the living organism set the path of further breakings of symmetry in the course of phylogenesis. The asymmetry of the right-twisting DNA molecule was the precursor of a number of molecular consequences, and other symmetry breakings affected living creatures either indirectly or as the result of a combination of external influences.

In the preceding chapter we encountered the asymmetries at the highest point of evolution, the human brain, and their consequences. We saw that asymmetry not only governs life functions -like the use of the hand, the motor regulation of speech -but also cognitive and emotional functions, like speech comprehension, the processing of written and visual information, counting, the appreciation of music, the learning process, the decision between the dictates of reason and of the emotions, creativity, aesthetic sensibility, a sense of humour, and so on. We do not yet understand the precise mechanism of most of these, but we know of their existence. This alone is enough to have an effect on the way in which we interpret and group our , on the one hand, and on the , on the other.

It transpired that nature is not perfectly symmetrical. Neither are human beings. Can art achieve perfect symmetry?