BOOK REVIEW: Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry

I opened this book full of expectation. Frank Close is an interesting and exciting lecturer and I felt sure that Lucifer's Legacy would have a great hold on me. Of course, I did not know what the title meant but the subtitle The Meaning of Asymmetry seemed to hold promise of a topic close to my heart.

It turns out that the main title refers to the fact that a statue of Lucifer in the Tuileries Gardens had lost its head, unlike its twin on the other side of the garden, and this accident had broken the garden's symmetry. Reading the inside cover told me that I would be taken on a sweeping tour of asymmetry in the world around me, from the development of human embryos to the mysterious Higgs boson. Certainly the start of the book describes what is meant by symmetry, the geometric type with which I am mainly familiar, and it talks about mirror images, asymmetric molecules and the non-symmetric nature of the brain. About a third of the way in, we get to x-rays, beta rays and alpha rays and our tour has turned into an exploration of the fundamental nature of matter and the four fundamental forces.

It seems that at the Big Bang a perfectly symmetric universe was created but, as the universe cooled, so asymmetries emerged. By starting at the macroscopic level and working down, Frank Close takes us through the atom, the nucleus and the fundamental particles, including quarks and even higher energy particles. But somehow I got lost on the way. Maybe it was the large number of anecdotes inserted at random intervals or that the story here was an historical account of how atomic and nuclear physics progressed and how the particles were discovered. Maybe it was because I am too close to geometrical symmetry and failed to absorb the full flavour of the asymmetry of the universe. To me the book lacks a clear structure (strange when it is all about structure) and jumps disconcertingly around as ideas come into the author's head.

So what audience is the book intended for? Not, I think, the non-scientist as it contains many very sophisticated ideas. Nor is it presumably intended for someone seeking out the physics of the development of the universe or the nature of matter; all the anecdotal stories and asides get in the way of this. Although Frank Close refers to the books of three other writers within the text, there is no bibliography, so presumably the intention is not to set the reader on a deeper search of the subject. Certain chapters with their historical discussion remind me of Longitude by Dava Sobel but without the same precise clarity.

Perhaps this is a book with which one can curl up in front of the fire to enjoy the large number of unpredictable snippets of information as they emerge. The title Lucifer's Legacy might imply this; possibly I took the sub-title, The Meaning of Asymmetry, just that bit too seriously.