Desperately Seeking Symmetry
From hair parts to the origin of the universe, how symmetry shapes our existence.
“Desperately Seeking Symmetry" Radiolab podcast show (april 18th 2011), featuring Robert Krulwich, Jad Abumrad, Lauren Silbert, Joy Hirsch, Natasha Gostwick, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Marcelo Gleiser, Mike Nicholls, John Walter, and Marcus du Sautoy.
This hour of Radiolab, former co-hosts Jad and Robert set out in search of order and balance in the world around us, and ask how symmetry shapes our very existence -- from the origins of the universe, to what we see when we look in the mirror.
Along the way, we look for love in ancient Greece, head to modern-day Princeton to peer inside our brains, and turn up an unlikely headline from the Oval Office circa 1979.
Robert kicks things off with a beautiful re-telling of a 2400-year-old love story from Plato, by way of Aristophanes, about the longing many of us feel for another half to make us whole. This ancient yearning gets us wondering whether the world around us is deeply and fundamentally symmetric, or...not. ...
The mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson posed a big question about mirrors in one of his best-known books: Through the Looking-Glass (yup, Dodgson's pen name was Lewis Carroll). Natasha Gostwick of Storynory reads an excerpt that gets at the heart of the trouble: is mirror milk any good to drink? ...
Just after the Big Bang, the universe was a primordial soup made of light. Then, it started belching out matter. Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how deeply shocking this is, and Marcelo Gleiser reveals an imperfection in the laws of physics that makes our very existence possible.
