Lucifer's Legacy The Meaning of Asymmetry

Modern scientific theory describes a uniformly perfect creation; a universe in which matter would have been destroyed within an instant of its appearance and where nothing that we now know could ever have happened. Human life itself seems lopsided, as the spherical embryo is transformed intoa highly structured being with its internal organs mirror asymmetric. The molecules of life differ from their mirror images: the milk in Alice's looking glass would not have been fit to drink. The mystery of how nature produces structured asymmetric patterns from an underlying uniformity is thefocus of much current scientific research.In Lucifer's Legacy, physicist and broadcaster Frank Close explores the origins of asymmetry from life to the Universe at large, and asks whether this multitude of examples can be traced back to a single act that took place at the origin of our Universe. Inspired by a chance meeting with Lucifer inthe Tuillerie gardens in Paris, Close takes the reader on a sweeping tour of asymmetry in the world around us, from the development of human embryos to the mysterious Higgs boson. His tour culminates in the research now underway in Switzerland, where scientists are preparing an experiment torecreate the Big Bang and hope to resolve the mystery of original asymmetry. Lucifer's Legacy describes the possible outcomes of this experiment, and assesses their implications for our understanding of the universe.

Frank Close is Head of Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Birmingham. He was Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, from 1997-2000. He has been a Fellow of the Institute of Physics since 1991, and was awarded the Kelvin Medal in 1996. He also lectured at the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1993.