Two books expound these seemingly opposed aspects of our universe: “Lucifer’s Legacy” by Frank Close, and “Supersymmetry” by Gordon Kane. But they are not really contradicting each other. In fact, “Lucifer’s Legacy”, which is mainly about asymmetry, has a closing chapter on supersymmetry.

Close explains the consequences of parity non-conservation at the sub-atomic level in its linkage to the matter/antimatter asymmetry and the chirality (handedness) of many biological molecules. Mirror images are strangely interrelated, while we usually think of them as separate.

It, is circularly polarized sunlight which selectively destroys one of the enantiomers, e.g. d-amino acids and 1-sugars. And the light is polarized in one circular dimension because parity (charge and mirror-inversion) is not conserved in the operation of the weak force which produces neutrinos in the Sun.

The universe began in symmetric fashion, but very early (tiny fractions of a second) the symmetry broke. This led to the other asymmetries mentioned above, and also, eventually, to differences between left and right brain in human, and the position of some internal organs (heart and stomach on the left, liver and appendix on the right). The lengths of our limbs are not equal, and even the two sides of our faces differ.

Kane’s book explains that each sub-atomic particle of the so-called “standard model” may have a supersymmetric partner; i.e. each fermion has a boson partner, and each boson has a fermion partner. The superpartners of the standard-model particles have not been observed, and we do not even know their masses. But the search is on, in the big collider machines, for the “LSP”, the lightest superpartner, whichever it turns out to be. The search also concerns the Higgs boson, the boson of the field that imparts mass to the particles.

So really, asymmetry and supersymmetry have very little in common, except that both concepts are at the leading edge of modern particle/physics, and explain many of the mysteries of the early and present universe.

See also “The Secrets of Stardust” by J. Mayo Greenberg in Scientific American, December 2000, pp. 70-75. Dust particles in intragalactic space in the Milky Way spin in one preferred direction, because of magnetic fields in the dust cloud. The dust particles contain organic compounds adhering to the silicate cores of the particles, or are dissolved in the ice covering. The organic compounds include amino acids and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The preferred spin direction of the dust particles polarized starlight in a preferred circular direction. This in turn polarized the amino acids. The particles may have seeded life on Earth.