Simple Nature - Light and Matter

u / In this scene from SwanLake, the choreography has asymmetry with respect to left andright.fields. However, the magnetic field patterns shown in figure s seemsto violate this principle. Could you use these patterns to explain leftand right to the alien? No. If you look back at the definition of themagnetic field, it also contains a reference to handedness: the directionof the vector cross product. The aliens might have reversedtheir definition of the magnetic field, in which case their drawingsof field patterns would look like mirror images of ours, as in the leftpanel of figure t.Until the middle of the twentieth century, physicists assumedthat any reasonable set of physical laws would have to have thiskind of symmetry between left and right. An asymmetry wouldbe grotesque. Whatever their aesthetic feelings, they had to changetheir opinions about reality when experiments by C.S. Wu et al. showedthat the weak nuclear force violates right-left symmetry! It is stilla mystery why right-left symmetry is observed so scrupulously ingeneral, but is violated by one particular type of physical process.v / C.S. Wu660 Chapter 11 Electromagnetism