Jon Butterworth’s column in the Grauniad picks up where he left off introducing the importance of symmetries in physics last time, in explaining how symmetries beyond the particles in the standard model (ie super-symmetries) affect the search for “what next” in the CERN LHC restart – dark matter or whatever.
Prompted to record the point since I’m in the middle of reading Lee Smolin’s contribution to the latest Unger and Smolin book (notes on Smolin chapters yet to be published) – where one corollary of their placing maths inside cosmological history (and its evolution) is that the idea that symmetries must be fundamental to physical laws and cosmological models is misguided – a misleading impression gained from experience within “Newtonian control volumes” as sub-sets of the cosmos.