Abstract
From time immemorial, philosophers, spiritual traditions of thought, and even scientists have been asking about the true and ultimate nature of things. Albert Einstein said of the feeling of the mysterious that thereby arises that it was
…the most beautiful experience we can have. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
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Notes
- 1.
A. Einstein, The World as I see It, Citadel Press, New York (2008).
- 2.
I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Conclusion.
- 3.
Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore, Rom 1623, cit. after R. Popkin, The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Simon & Schuster, New York (1966).
- 4.
W. Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, New York (1971), p. 78.
- 5.
W. Heisenberg, Steps Across Borders, Munich (1971).
- 6.
P. Dirac, The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature, Scientific American, 208 (5) (1963).
- 7.
N. Poincare, Science et méthode, Paris (1908), p. 19.
- 8.
I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Translated by J. C. Meredith, Oxford University Press, New York (1952), p. 73.
- 9.
The phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking also occurs in other contexts, e.g., in ferromagnets, in the formation of crystals from a liquid, and also in superconductivity. There it is described by the Landau theory, named after the Russian physicist Lew Landau who developed it in 1937.
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Jaeger, L. (2018). Symmetries: Beauty in the House of Physics. In: The Second Quantum Revolution. Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98824-5_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98824-5_18
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