¶ Equilibrium
Index Entry
Equilibrium:
“The Universe just refuses to get caught at equilibrium. I became suspicious back in 1927 that nature didn’t become infinitely disorderly. We caught her in sort of a symmetric phase where you called it a molecule, and another symmetric we may call a cell. Thus we get what we call atom. And then we get the complexes like human beings, and they are sort of levels of symmetry. But these levels of symmetry would never occur in equilibrium; they are always on one side or the other: the crystal is positive or negative. So she had what I call asymmetry, and she had what I saw was minimum asymmetry and maximum asymmetry-- which we call disorderly just because it was more confusing to look at. But she did everything relative to equilibrium. She would go from the negative through the equilibrium to the positive. But she refused to get caught at it. So the concave-- pull the rubber glove off your left hand and now it fits your right hand-- and the concave becomes the convex. You could have the proton and neutron, and they were always known to coexist. These are the covariables, which is complementarity, as they call it in physics.”
