HomeI have also published some articles outside theoretical physics.
Here is a scholarly article on female breasts (NEW
LITERARY HIST 32 (1): 201-216 WIN 2001) in New Literary History, a heavily academic
journal read by English professors and others. In the issue containing my invited
article
“On
Fat Deposits around the Mammary Glands in the Females of Homo Sapiens”
there are articles with such fascinating titles as “Modernity, Postmodernity,
and the Future Perfect,” “God, the Universe, Art, and Communism,”
“"Les Moi en Moi": The Proustian Self in Philosophical Perspective,”
and “Dante in Paradise: The End of Allegorical Interpretation.”
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I was inspired by the following exchange between Zoe and Bloom
in James Joyce's Ulysses:
Zoe: . . . Come and I will peel off.
Bloom: (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of
a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.) Somebody will be
dreadfully jealous if she knew.
I wrote:
Perhaps Joyce knew something way ahead of his time. Gauging
symmetries would turn out to be one of the favorite activities of theoretical
physicists starting in the late 1960s. I described in considerable detail how
fundamental physics is now known to be dictated by gauge symmetry in my book
Fearful Symmetry: the Search
for Beauty in Modern Physics. The notion of gauge symmetry turned
out to be the magic "open sesame" that has allowed physicists a glimpse
of Mother Nature's secrets at the most fundamental level.
For years after quoting this Joycean passage in Fearful Symmetry, I have
pondered over the deep meaning behind it. Surely the ability of a human being
to "gauge the symmetry of her peeled pears" is of far more import
than his or her ability to gauge the symmetry of a nonabelian field theory.
Indeed, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, the former led to the
latter by a long and torturous chain of events. It is our finely tuned ability
to gauge the reproductive value of each other that produced over the evolutionary
time scale a species capable of gauging the symmetry of Mother Nature herself.
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