Symmetries
Summary
Medium: Custom Java software using the Processing library
Status: Complete (2012)
Presentation/Publication history: Interrupt II Conference (2012), NEASA Digital Revolutions Conference (2012), ELO Conference Gallery of First Encounters (2014)
Description
Symmetries is a digital text comprised of about three hundred eighty sextillion poems, or about one poem for each star in the universe. Each poem can be read in a grammatically sensible way either left-to-right or top-to-bottom. Symmetries does not just shuffle through these poems at random, but in order to understand its movement, one must understand what “symmetry” means to a physicist.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand the role of symmetries in physics is by asking a simple question: What would happen if everything in the universe suddenly moved one meter in the same direction? The answer, naturally, is that nothing would happen, since physical laws don’t change based on position. Over time, physicists have discovered far less obvious symmetries in nature, however. In fact, the transformations of every particle in the universe are governed by three symmetries, known as SU(3), SU(2), and U(1). Almost everything we understand about the fundamental building blocks of nature is determined by these three symmetries1. This is a breath-takingly beautiful idea: Everything in the natural world, from the burning of distant stars to the incredible variety of life on Earth, is connected by these three simple symmetries; the universe is what it is because of these symmetries.
In Symmetries, words shift and interact according to exactly these three symmetries, creating a miniature representation of every particle in the universe. Furthermore, the harp in the background is not simply a looped recording; it too changes according to the symmetries that describe our universe.
To View
Symmetries is available as a runnable jar which you can download here. To run it, you should first make sure you have Java installed on your system. You should then be able to double-click on the downloaded jar file to execute it on most Windows and Mac systems as well as many Linux desktop environments.
You can also view video documentation2 of Symmetries below:
Footnotes
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Those readers with a physics background will note that this leaves out general relativity (equivalently gravity). Understanding general relativity in the framework described here is an open problem, but the left-right/up-down symmetry of each poem is a gesture toward the Poincaré group of special relativity. ↩
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Due to Youtube formatting requirements, the video/audio quality is not ideal for this documentation, so I encourage you to check out the “live” runnable jar version if possible. Finding a way around these limitations is high on my ever-overflowing todo list, so you should hopefully see a cleaner version next time you visit. ↩