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Delia Pahang HM 1C 27/08/2022 1

Chapter 6 of Ian Stewart’s Nature’s Numbers

What is symmetry?

Let's start with the specific and move toward the broad. You spend much of your time
inside one of the most well-known symmetric forms. The left and right halves of the
human body are "bilaterally symmetric," which means that they are almost identical. As
previously mentioned, the human body has only loose bilateral symmetry; the heart is
not in the middle, and the two sides of the face are not identical. However, the overall
shape is quite close to being perfectly symmetrical, and we can visualize an idealized
human figure whose left and right sides are identical to demonstrate the mathematics of
symmetry. exactly the same, though? Not completely. The figure's two sides each
occupy a different area of space, and the left side is the right's mirror counterpart.

When we use words like "image," we automatically think of how one shape corresponds
to another and how one shape might be moved to make it coincide with another.
According to bilateral symmetry, the right half can be obtained by reflecting the left half
in a mirror. Although it is a mathematical idea, reflection is not a number, shape, or
formula. It is a makeover, or a guideline for rearranging things.

Numerous transformations are feasible, but the majority are not symmetry. The mirror
must be positioned on the symmetry axis, which separates the figure into its two related
halves, in order to correctly relate the halves. The human form is thus rendered
invariant, or visually unaltered, through reflection. In other words, we have discovered a
precise mathematical definition of bilateral symmetry: a form is bilaterally symmetric if it
is invariant by reflection. A symmetry of an item or system is, more broadly speaking,
any alteration that renders it invariant. This description is a great illustration of what I
previously referred to as the "thingification of processes" because it turns the process of
"moving like this" into a thing with symmetry. This straightforward yet beautiful
categorization provides access to a vast field of mathematics.
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There are many different kinds of symmetry. The most important ones are reflections,
rotations, and translations-or, less formally, flips, turns, and slides. If you take an object
in the plane, pick it up, and flip it over onto its back, you get the same effect as if you
had reflected it in a suitable mirror. To find where the mirror should go, choose some
point on the original object and look at where that point ends up when the object is
flipped. The mirror must go halfway between the point and its image, at right angles to
the line that joins them (see figure 3). Reflections can also be carried out in
threedimensional space, but now the mirror is of a more familiar kind-namely, a flat
surface.

As a wheel spins around its hub, you choose a point, known as the center, and rotate
the object in the plane about that point. The "size" of the rotation is determined by the
number of degrees you rotate the object through. Consider a flower with four similar
petals that are spaced equally. The flower is symmetrical when rotated through a 90°
angle because it appears the same regardless of the angle. Even in three dimensions,
rotations are possible; but, to do so, you must select an axis and rotate your objects
around it as the Earth rotates. Again, items can be rotated around the same axis at
various degrees.

In other words, our universe might not have been the same; it might have been any of
the alternative universes that might have formed by potentially violating symmetry in a
different way. That is a profound notion. The cosmos, the atom, and ourselves are all
governed by the same fundamental mechanism of pattern formation and symmetry
breaking in a mass-produced universe, which is an even more fascinating idea.