Fearful Symmetry

After a very lengthy absence from the science game, I decided it was high time I read another nonfiction book. This one's all about modern physics. I'm sure you know about the electron and have heard of things called quarks. That was more or less the extent of my subatomic physics knowledge as well, prior to reading Fearful Symmetry. (Well, that's a bit of a fib, but bear with me.) Now, I'm practically an expert on fermions and bosons, the search for (and problems with) a "grand unification theory," and five-dimensional spacetime. Or was it ten-dimensional space? Alright, clearly, I'm still pretty lost about a number of things I just read about. But this was honestly a pretty enjoyable and interesting book. Zee spends a very small amount of time going over some basic physics before launching into two-hundred or so pages detailing the history of physics in the twentieth century. My biggest issue with the book was that it was written in 1984, and as such, pays no attention to the last twenty-five years of groundbreaking discoveries and theories. String theory, most notably, is largely absent. One aspect of the book I enjoyed was Zee's constant reference to a "Grand Creator." Zee always referred to this "Being" with capitalization - even on pronouns such as "He." (Or "She" when he was talking about "Nature" - also capitalized.) In the afterword, Zee pointed out that his belief in a creator was not so much a theistic one but more out of faith to his own field of study: physics. Anyway, there were a number of very cool passages, anecdotes, theories, and facts that I took away from the book. Did you know, for example, that no one has yet found a way to prove that time "flows" in one direction? I'll end this recap where I probably should have started it: with an explanation of the title. Well, at least the "symmetry" part. You see, symmetry is a guiding principle of modern physics and the search for new particles and explanations about how particles interact. An electron, for example, has a certain mass, spin, charge, and many other quantities. Why then should there not be another particle with the same mass and spin but a different (opposite) charge? Or one with the same mass and charge but an equal and opposite spin? It was this kind of thinking that led scientists to predict (and then later on verify) the existence of a number of quarks that hitherto had been completely unknown and totally unobserved. To me, that's pretty cool. Such a simple idea - symmetry - proving to be so fruitful in the realm of subnuclear particles. I could never be a theoretical physicist because of all the utterly complex and abstract mathematical theory that goes on, but I certainly respect the field and the sheer creativity that never gets associated with it amongst the masses.