The Ambidextrous Universe

The Ambidextrous Universe
Author(s)	Martin Gardner
Illustrator	John Mackey
Cover artist	Germano Facetti
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject(s)	Scientific, Mathematics
Genre(s)	Non-Fiction
Publisher	Penguin Books
Publication date	1964
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	276 pp
ISBN	0486442446
OCLC Number	57373717
Dewey Decimal	539.7/2 22
LC Classification	QC793.3.S9 G37 2005

The Ambidextrous Universe is a popular science book by Martin Gardner covering aspects of symmetry and asymmetry in human culture, science and the wider universe.

Originally published in 1964, it underwent revisions in 1969, 1979, 1990 and 2005 (the last two are known as the "Third, revised edition"). Originally titled The Ambidextrous Universe: Mirror Asymmetry and Time-Reversed Worlds, subsequent editions are known as The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings.

Content

The book begins with the subject of mirrors, and from there passes through symmetry in poetry, shapes, art, music, galaxies, suns, planets and wildlife. It then moves into molecular scale physics and how symmetry and asymmetry have evolved from the beginning of life on Earth. There is a chapter on carbon and its versatility, and the last eight chapters concern a problem called the Ozma Problem.

The Ozma Problem

The 18th chapter, "The Ozma Problem", poses a problem that Gardner claims would arise if Earth should ever enter into communication with life on another planet through Project Ozma. This is the problem of how to communicate the meaning of left and right, where the two communicants are conditionally not allowed to view any one object in common. The problem was first implied in Immanuel Kant's discussion of left and right, and William James mentioned it in his chapter on "The Perception of Space" in Principles of Psychology (1890). It is also mentioned by Charles Howard Hinton.

The solution to the Ozma Problem is embodied in an experiment conducted by Chien-Shiung Wu involving the beta decay of cobalt-60. This experiment was the first to disprove the conservation of parity. However, Gardner added in the last chapter of his book that the Ozma Problem is only solved within our galaxy: due to the nature of antimatter, an antigalaxy would get the opposite result from the experiment conducted by Wu.

Nabokov reference

In the original 1964 edition of The Ambidextrous Universe, Gardner quoted two lines of poetry from Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire which are supposed to have been written by a poet, "John Shade", who is actually fictional. As a joke, Gardner credited the lines only to Shade and put Shade's name in the index as if he were a real person. In his 1969 novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Nabokov returned the favor by having the character Van Veen "quote" the Gardner book along with the two lines of verse:

"Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears," says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher ("Martin Gardiner" [sic]) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165 [sic].^[1]

Nabokov misspells Gardner's name and gives the wrong page number (it's actually 168), both of which may have been intentional.

References

1. ^ Nabokov, Vladimir (1969), Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, McGraw-Hill Book Company, pg 577.