Ní huasal ná íseal ach thuas seal sa saol seo ach agus thíos seal agus íseal seal.
There is no upper state nor lower state in this life but up for a little while and down for a little while
Old Irish Proverb

One day as Manjusri stood outside the gate, the Buddha called to him, “Manjusri, Manjusri, why do you not enter?” Manjusri replied, “I do not see myself as outside. Why enter?”
“Manjusri Enters the Gate: Zen Koans” by Venerable Gyomay Kubose

Alice sighed wearily. ‘I think you might do something better with the time, than waste time asking riddles with no answers.’
“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it…”
Lewis Carroll- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

‘Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figure too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?’
‘Yes.’
‘They are lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jig on top of a tombstone.’ […]
‘Consecutively and consequentially,’ he continued, ‘you can safely infer that you are made of atoms yourself…The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural live riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.’
I let go a gasp of astonishment that made a sound in the air like a bad puncture.
‘And you would be flabbergasted at the number of bicycles that are half-human almost half-man, half-partaking of humanity.’
Flann O’Brien – The Third Policeman

Why I chose to parade the above bon mots at the beginning of this article is largely due to the obscure nature of the topic of “Symmetry Breaking” – a topic I believe is rendered thus by a western cultural bias more than anything else. So I chose these four citations just to limber you up a bit for the acceptance of the contrary nature of Symmetry Breaking and its potential riches.
From the point of view of definition, symmetry is best viewed as harmony. In physical law, symmetry is not so much a notion of form but more so one of a model; the concept of symmetry is attached to a governing law that applies uniformly (harmoniously) throughout this model, affecting all is elements the same. Symmetry “breaks” when this law ceases to have this characteristic.

One of the first western physicists to formalize the nature of symmetry breaking was Pierre Curie who, in the late part of the 19th century described it as being characteristic of phenomenon occurring and that there were two types of breaking – explicit and spontaneous. To me, the distinction is this: explicit symmetry breaking is when you are kind of expecting the phenomenon and spontaneous symmetry breaking is when you are kind of not expecting the phenomenon…

If you refer to my earlier article “On Theory Building,” the description of the failure of the Michelson Morely experiment to ratify the symmetry governing the universe is, without doubt, the single most spectacular incident of symmetry breaking in our history. And Einstein showed us how to fix it.

[My own reflections have led to the following: By examining incomplete spaces in a Mobius model and the symmetry breaking therein and the cardinality of fractal half-twists, I derived an expression of how many dimensions there are in the universe. I believe firmly that physical symmetry will always break. Essentially, we push a model to its limit and then apply as many dimensions as needed to patch it. This sequence persists as long as we do, as long as we have the time to examine and push these models to breaking point.

The sequence goes 1, 4, 11, 26, 57….
Well, if we look at Einstein’s fix as retroactive – he introduced the time dimensionality that had been cast aside in the Cartesian model – we get 3+1, where it ought to be 1+3 – I’ve for a while felt that time should be labeled the 1st dimension – not the fourth.
11 is the dimensionality of M theory.
26 is the dimensionality of Bosonic types (e.g. tachyons and bosons).
57 is the dimensionality of E8 (the Lie group recently charted – I call it the Heinz dimension).
120 is next….]

But there have been others since.
The Mandelbrot set.
x → x^n + c

That’s all it is. And you get a computer to sweep a complex number plane, iterating this function on a dense matrix of points thousands of times and your computer will generate the most complex mathematical object known to man. A point will do one of two things – it will bounce around in a bounded set, or it will jump (called a Haussdorff jump) to infinity. And you get your computer to assign a colour to the speed at which this number point approaches its infinity – where the symmetry/harmony of the set breaks. Fractal geometry was born. I encourage you do a web search on the Mandelbrot set, particularly for an interactive model so that you can play with the set yourself, view the immeasurable complexity and self similarity with your own eyes.
It is well to note the role of the computer here. It was not until the development of computer processing power to do these computations that we were allowed to see this set – these calculations could never be done “by hand” – I often use the following simile: The computer to complexity is as the microscope to molecular biology. The technology reveals the science.

Focusing on the complexity rather than the self similarity (for the purposes of this article), my feelings become rather strong, as I come to learn that simplicity and complexity are not mutually exclusive concepts. This is one chink in our cavern that permits almost blinding light in from the East. (Heisenberg himself remarked and the phenomenal rate of the development of quantum physics in post-war Japan). The Zen statement that “Emptiness is fullness” is one of the explicit “choker” statements when it comes to the West’s binary renaissance mind machine that labours under the dictum of “Tertium non datum” – the third state does not exist – either it is or it is not. Yet here you have it. The Mandlebrot set. Can be generated with 20 – 25 lines of computer code. See the result for yourself. Simple? Complex?

What this affords us is the opportunity to portal in centuries and centuries of eastern wisdom into our thinking and approaches now that our binary machine has finally, demonstrably, in Technicolor, failed us – again.(How many more times!!???)
So if you ask me the question: “Is nature complex or simple?” I will respond in my lilting Irish brogue, perfected by generations, bound by tradition, hallowed usage: “Well (pause), is and it isn’t…” and be staring wistfully at the middle distance. (I subscribe to the practice of drawing on one’s indigenous culture to the fullest – I am of a race of sweet talking scoundrels and horsedealers, immersed in triads for nigh on three millennia and counting…)

And therein lies the comedy. Many things make us laugh. Irony is one of them. In my own case, in the early years of developing my theory, symmetry would break, my theory (along with my world) would fall apart. But now I have come to learn that when she breaks down, I will simply be becoming larger. I smile. Wryly. But I smile. So I say this. If you do not know whether to laugh or cry, laugh. And I also say this. If the theory you are investigating or your own reflections on nature are causing you to chuckle, there is an excellent chance that you are converging on a greater truth, and rejoice.