Lucifer's Legacy

Over time, scientists have investigated the 'fearful symmetry' that seemed to underlie the Universe. But increasingly, it looks as if life is the result of cosmic asymmetry. This book follows the trail, from subtle asymmetries in nature to the mysterious Higgs boson that scientists now believe may hold the key to the birth of the Universe itself.

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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 into a 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 the focus 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 in the 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 to recreate 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.