In “Symmetry: A ‘Key to Nature’s Secrets’” (New York Review of Books , October 2011), Steven Weinberg tells us,
I said that I would be concerned here with the symmetries of laws, not of objects, but there is one thing that is so important that I need to say a bit about it. It is the universe. As far as we can see, when averaged over sufficiently large scales containing many galaxies, the universe seems to have no preferred position, and no preferred directions—it is symmetrical. But this too may be an accident.
There is an attractive theory, called chaotic inflation, according to which the universe began without any special spatial symmetries, in a completely chaotic state. Here and there by accident the fields pervading the universe were more or less uniform, and according to the gravitational field equations it is these patches of space that then underwent an exponentially rapid expansion, known as inflation, leading to something like our present universe, with all nonuniformities in these patches smoothed out by the expansion. In different patches of space the symmetries of the laws of nature would be broken in different ways. Much of the universe is still chaotic, and it is only in the patches that inflated sufficiently (and in which symmetries were broken in the right ways) that life could arise, so any beings who study the universe will find themselves in such patches.
This is all quite speculative. There is observational evidence for an exponential early expansion, which has left its traces in the microwave radiation filling the universe, but as yet no evidence for an earlier period of chaos. If it turns out that chaotic inflation is correct, then much of what we observe in nature will be due to the accident of our particular location, an accident that can never be explained, except by the fact that it is only in such locations that anyone could live.
From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong ,
Weinberg ends with a landscape sort of picture, involving symmetries emerging only when a specific ground state emerges out of an initial chaotic inflation state. Philosophically this is a popular view of the future of the subject these days, but one that has so far led nowhere, and one that I think even in principle can never lead anywhere. Much more interesting would be to try and draw lessons from what has worked well in the past: exactly the gauge symmetries and spontaneous symmetry breaking phenomena that led to the standard model. We may very well soon find out there is no Higgs particle, turning this whole subject into a wide-open one. Future progress may come from exactly the same place as in the past: new ideas about how to exploit the mathematical structures inherent in quantum mechanical symmetries.
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