Third Monday Musing: On an irony of the creation of something from nothing

Its paradoxical aesthetic asymmetry

By Rolf Dumke

What fun to read your philosophical-historical query on why is there something rather than nothing!
    Modern physicists have indeed analyzed why there is something. According to the latest theories, the initial Big Bang should have created exactly the same amount of matter and anti-matter – i.e., in symmetry – at the first moment of explosion. And these should have immediately combined to eliminate each other, eliminating everything that had been created in the first tenzillionth squared of a second.
    But evidently there was an extremely small asymmetry working in the Big Bang. Although matter and anti-matter for multitude possible universes was created and destroyed, a teeny bit of matter remained, out of which our universe evolved.
    Our existence, our world and universe, thus, is the result of a tiny asymmetry working at the beginning of time. The initial asymmetry at the beginning of the universe, ironically, broke the fundamental artistic / aesthetic / natural / mathematical principle of symmetry.
    See Wikipedia’s great picture of the chronology of the universe and the early history of the universe. The following image comes from the first article:

    My views on the role of asymmetry creating matter – i.e., something rather than nothing – in the early universe come from a short, clear statement by CERN Press on Matter/Antimatter Asymmetry.

I took a course from philosophy Professor Paul Weiss (1901-2002!) at Yale on the philosophy of art. He taught the course dramatically by ambulating and gesticulating vigorously on a wide platform – a stage – in dialogue with his undergraduate and graduate students, who were eager to respond to his questions and refute him. The course was chaotic and fun and one with a simple thesis, that beauty and truth are inseparable, a classical view.

    Curiously – perhaps because he was not well-read in English literature? – Weiss did not refer to the great poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats (1795-1823), which describes the poet’s walk around the urn seeing different bucolic and amorous-playful scenes of young men chasing young women, asking himself, Who are these beautiful persons, what is going on?
    The poem has the famous refrain, an oblique answer to those questions:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
That is all ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know.

That was Weiss’s theme, which in my youthful enthusiasm I bought, hook, line, and sinker. Thus, the beautiful is symmetric and true, asymmetry is ugly and false. If asymmetry is the precondition of existence, the consequence must be that we live in an ugly universe, an ugly world, which is somehow not right.
    Recall that magical and beautiful, circular dance of solar systems around the center of the Milky Way – harmonious, beautiful motion, despite asymmetry.

Or are we dissembling in the face of a conundrum given by the fact of mass asymmetry and the inverse of the general principle that beauty/symmetry equals truth? Is stating a new beauty – beautiful motion – confusing the analysis by increasing the degree of complexity? This may be a good strategy when playing a weak opponent in chess, but is it a strategy that can clarify an internal dialogue?
    The answer given below is yes, and it is complicated. A philosopher would admonish us to clarify our definition of “something,” and of symmetry and beauty, and to identify the apparent truths told by beauty.

On mass. According to Einstein’s special relativity, mass and energy are simply alternative forms. Recall that Energy = Mass times the speed of light squared (E = mc²). This complicates the discussion of what is “something,” for we forgot that there exists a lot of energy. Possibly over 70% of the universe is composed by dark energy; about 25% by dark, unseen mass. What we see – the stars, etc. – is about 5%. We need all this dark stuff to explain the expansion of the universe.

On symmetry. Ian Stewart argued in Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry, 2007, that symmetry is an intrinsic element of the composition of nature, of cosmology theory and, especially, of special relativity theory and mathematics. Symmetry reduces complexity and error and provides a good natural check on mathematical theories.
    Magnus Enquist and Anthony Arak argue in “Symmetry, Beauty, and Evolution,” Letters to Nature, 372, November 1994:

Humans and other species find symmetrical patterns more attractive than asymmetrical ones. These preferences may appear in response to biological signals, or in situations where there is no obvious signalling context, such as exploratory behaviour and human aesthetic response to pattern.

    Wikipedia states that facial symmetry in humans is one specific measure of bodily asymmetry. Facial symmetry influences judgments of aesthetic traits of physical attractiveness and beauty, and is also associated with health and genetic fitness. Furthermore, while symmetrical faces are perceived to be attractive, completely symmetric faces are disconcerting and are not perceived as normal.
    D. W. Zaidel, S. M. Aarde, and K. Baig, in “Appearance of symmetry, beauty, and health in human faces,” Brain and Cognition, 2005, argue:

We found that symmetry and attractiveness were not strongly related in faces of women or men, while health and symmetry were related.

    The recent new journal, Symmetry, Volume 1, 2009, has an article by Joe Rosen, “Symmetry at the Foundation of Science and Nature,” which is a summary of his book, Symmetry Rules: How Science and Nature Are Founded on Symmetry, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, 2008.
    In “Asymmetry and Symmetry in the Beauty of Human Faces,” Symmetry 2010, Dahlia Zaidel and Marjan Hessamian find that “both symmetry and asymmetry serve as highly aesthetic sources of beauty, whether the context is perceptual or conceptual.”
    Thus, symmetry is a ubiquitous presence in nature, science, and aesthetics. It is useful as a check for truth and gives important signals of attractiveness as well as of the health of persons.
    There are very different forms of symmetry. In mathematics and special relativity, symmetry means the retention of basic structures after transformations. Symmetry’s relation to beauty is complicated. A bit of asymmetry increases the attractiveness of a person’s face. Symmetry is complex.

On the truth of beauty. It is a reality check. Ian Stewert, in Why Beauty Is Truth, states:

The true strength of mathematics lies precisely in this remarkable fusion of the human sense of pattern (Beauty) with the physical world, which acts both as a reality check (Truth) and as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

    It is also a signal of health, according to Zaidel, Aarde, and Baig, 2005; and Wikipedia.

What was the truth in Keats’s poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn? An unclear signal, as the still ongoing discussion of this question shows. The decorative Greek vase that Keats presumably saw looks merely pretty.

    A clear contrast is given by the views of the Laokoon sculpture in the Vatican, the icon of great Greek sculptures in Germany at the same time (the early 19^th century).

Although Laokoon is struggling with a serpent to save his boys and himself from being strangled, his facial demeanor and physical stature are nobly constrained in the face of deathly struggle. Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768), an important connoisseur of ancient Greek art, described it as edle Einfalt und stille Groesse (noble simplicity and restrained greatness), a depiction which then spread to a view of all ancient Greek art in Germany. All German high school students learn this in their German courses. Johann Goethe (1749–1832) found that the sculpture depicted a tempest of pain and passion that is softened by beauty and grace. (Sturm der Leiden und Leidenschaft durch Anmut und Schönheit mildern.) Both Winckelmann and Goethe saw Laokoon as great because the sculpture group unified both symmetry and asymmetry.
    My view is more sober. The sculpture looks like over-muscled Schwarzenegger and boys struggling, a disappointment which also crept into me when visiting the great Pergamon Altar on the Berlin Museumsinsel. It is an altar to the muscle-bound.

    Apparently, truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. Instead of these sculptures, I see the magnificence of Greek art manifested in its great temples. I recall Vincent Scully's introductory lecture to his celebrated course on the history of architecture at Yale, where 700 hushed students in a dark hall looked up to a huge, bright slide projection of the front of the Parthenon temple. Scully pointed with a long stick at its details and proportions and said, "This is where architecture began."

    Decades later I got the same chill crawling up my back while gazing up at the Temple of Neptune in Paestum, Italy, touching its gnarled columns made up of the yellow-pink sandstone quarried from the cliffs in the mountain behind the Paestum temple assembly near the Mediterranean beach. Meanwhile, my wife and children were running around weaving through the columns, playing hide and seek on a late sunny afternoon. It was beautiful and uplifting. Edle Einfalt und stille Groesse was the appropriate description.

Finally, we need to understand the reason for the recent discussion of the creation of mass in the universe that was instigated by the 2013 Nobel Prize being given to Peter Higgs for his field theory and for CERN finding evidence of a Higgs boson, a particle that gives mass. This is a new, very heavy fundamental subatomic particle, also called the God-particle by recent commentators, like Stephen Hawking [“'God particle' could destroy universe, says Stephen Hawking”].
    Dennis Overbye, science editor at the New York Times, has a wonderful article on Peter Higgs, "Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles," November 4, 2013:

Near the end of The Tempest, in what has been taken as Shakespeare's farewell speech, the sorcerer Prospero breaks his staff and declares,

Our revels now are ended.
...
These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
and...leave not a rack behind.

The latest word from physics is that this ending may be in store for the universe. In this case, the role of Prospero is played by the Higgs field, an invisible ocean of energy that permeates space, confers mass on elementary particles, and gives elementary forces their distinct features and strengths.

    Even though Higgs bosons created our universe, a quantum change in the strength of the Higgs field sometime in the future could instantly destroy it, "melt it into thin air," and create another universe.
    How’s that for the state of “something,” being on the brink of immediate and total destruction? What beauty, besides the ephemeral, exists in this curious chaos?
    Just a footnote on the Higgs field. It almost sounds like a version of reality according to Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753), who argued that we exist only in the perception of God – a field argument.

Copyright © 2014 by Rolf Dumke Rolf Dumke is an economic historian whose life-long, wide-ranging interests in the arts and sciences were inspired by Yale College courses, which provided him a smorgasbord of great ideas. He taught in Canadian and German universities, and today lives in Bavaria, near the Alps.