07 July, 2017

Spontaneous symmetry breaking

Perfect beauty is destined to fall apart. That is essentially what the spontaneous symmetry breaking theory of physicist Yoichiro Nambu tells us. The world would not have mass if it were perfectly symmetrical (that's how it was in the beginning when the big bang happened) and only by breaking that constraint (thanks to the Higgs boson) it gives rise to existence.

We live in an age where physics is intersecting philosophy. Those revelations that thinkers, philosophers and enlightened people knew about for millennia, the unifying field that connects everything. The fact that there's is no such thing as an isolated event, the realization that time and space are in fact the same thing, egolessness and the lack of self-importance. All that was discovered by physics and science in general when we started looking at the smaller (bacteria, molecules, atoms, elementary particles, quantum physics) and bigger (the solar system, our galaxy and the universe) scales.

Seeking answers is perhaps the greatest virtue humanity possesses.