Asymmetry

Very comprehensive. A masterpiece.

Marian Annett has produced in her second edition of her original work, an excellent and sophisticated explanation of how the prevalence of left handedness remains within our society.
Her work offers an explanation of how, and why there are a consistent minority of left handers in existence. The book focuses on her `right shift` theory, an extremely plausible account of Brain Asymetry. A must for any degree level student of Psychology.

Before I start to criticise "Lucifer's Legacy", I should add that I am a trained physicist, and wanted to brush up a bit about ideas of symmetry/asymmetry, which have become essential to our quest to explain the physics of the universe. Having clarified this, I must say the first part of this book was a real disappointment: it seems to be intended for people who have not heard much about physics since they left high school. There are some nice detours about the history of physics about the turn of the century. But apart from that, the book often is annoyingly trivial. Towards the end it gets more interesting, and some ideas about symmetry and symmetry breaking are nicely presented. But if you look for more than light bedtime reading, look somewhere else.

This book is a pleasant, painless introduction to particle physics and the applications of symmetry in the universe. I could see how it might annoy an experienced physicist with entire chapters full of metaphors and analogies intended to solidify the reader's understanding of the concepts, but for a beginner these are quite helpful. It also includes a long and detailed history of the major discoveries in atomic physics, which is a tiny bit too long, but still informative and well written. I am a junior in high school, and I enjoyed this book immensely.

Frank Close has written an accessible, entertaining essay on "matter/anti-matter" theories--and implications--soon to be tested at the CERN high-energy particle research center in Switzerland. The giant atom smasher, LEP(Large electron/positron (anti-electron); and super vaccum, magnetic "bottles" needed to contain anti-matter are clearly described. Their purpose:A SIMULATION of the BIG BANG in 2005. "LET THERE BE LIGHT! Can man do what God did ex nihilo? LUCIFER'S LEGACY is a fun book that will help interested non-scientists tune-in and find-out.

I'm not going to say that I understand all of this. Most of it is way over my head, but after reading it, I can say that I understand more now than I did before. I'm planning on attacking it again in a couple years. Overall, however, Gardner does a good job of bring complicated scientific theory down to a plain English level by using diagrams and analogies.

Every decade Gardner updates this book. The five new chapters in the 1990 edition, including material on twistors and superstrings, are well worth the price. What Gardner does best is frame the new theories within a historical perspective. For example, he says it is impossible not to compare string theory with Lord Kelvin's (W. Thompson) 1958 theory of vortex strings. Vortex string theory was fashionable for at least fifty years. Gardner shows the vortex string theory and the superstring theory to be kissing cousins: Lord Kelvin used perfect fluid to refer to the superstring quantum vacuum -- both referring to the same sub-space area. String theory speaks of vibrating frequencies of energy while vortex rings were also vibrating frequencies that gave the atoms different properties. Instead of quantum foam with jittering virtual particles, vortex theory had vortex sponges with billions of vortex motions whirling in all directions.

Gardner's account of Roger Penrose's twistor theory is short and excellent. Physicists have gotten tangled up trying to speak of deeper down events which are hidden from view due to their sub-Planck length size (10 to the minus 33rd power of a centimeter). Here it is pointed out that "on a sufficiently small scale the concept of a space-time point evaporates in the complex space of twistor theory." Twistor theory, like superstring theory, was merely trying to formulate how the submicroscopic particles come into being. Both theories consist of math and lack any experimental verification. To repeat, the author discusses these obtuse theories in a way that frames their overall direction of thought. Gardner appears to agree with Howard George who calls superstring theory a "recreational mathematical theology." The bottom line -- both twistor and string theory are philosophy -- not physics.

I think that THE NEW AMBIDEXTROUS UNIVERSE (1990) is a wonderful book on symmetry and asymmetry in the worlds of everyday life, chemistry, physics, and unification theories. Everything in this book is noteworthy, and also up-to-date except for the last few chapters.
It is a very good updating of the previous (1978) edition, which concluded with many open questions in elementary particle physics that were resolved (and new questions raised) in 1978 - 1989.
It is high time for this book to be updated if Mr. Gardner can manage it (he is rather elderly; born in 1914), and a publisher will take a new edition. Books like this are gueling to revise and update.

As a left-hand thrower in baseball and right-footed kicker in American football in my youth, I was fascinated by the enormous amount of information on left-right asymmetries presented by the erudite Professor McManus. However my confidence in the validity of the flood of information from his extraordinarily broad set of sources was marred by finding the Professor dead wrong on contributions from the two small areas that I know better than he does -- baseball and parity in physics.
The main advantage of batting left-handed is not due to that batter being closer to first base but to the easier job the left-swinger has in hitting a right-hand pitcher's curve ball. And switch-hitters do not have an "advantage because of the unpredictability of their shot making" but because, batting left-handed against right-handed pitchers and right-handed against left-handed pitchers, they hit curve balls better.
Also, the "asymmetry" in the force on a compass needle near a current that McManus considers that Oersted ignored in early failures to detect that force in the infancy of physics, vanishes if the experimenter uses a current to makes his own magnetized needle. Indeed, it was just that left-right symmetry of electromagnetic forces that led physicists to believe that it was likely that the other fundamental forces would be similarly
symmetric. Hence, the violation of that left-right "parity" symmetry which Yang and Lee postulated and that Wu, Ambler, and others demonstrated, was very important. I agree with McManus that the "mistake" that he describes is "incredible", but it is his mistake and not that of physicists.

I'm a 'lefty', 'southpaw', 'cack-handed' etc. My daughter bought me this for my birthday. It was a very interesting read.

The only downside was that some of the chapters seemed too long, at over 30 pages? There were points when the topic of the chapter seemed exhausted, and was strung out, and on more than one occasion my interest waned, only to perk up on the next page when some new issue was introduced, and off we went again?

What I liked best was the little anecdotes, like how it took years for Canada to decide whether to drive on the Left or the Right, with British Columbia & the Maritime Provinces not changing over until after the First World War, and then still over a number years between 1920 and 1924. Similarly how Western & Eastern Austria drove on different sides of the road until 1938.

A fascinating read.

This book is easy to read and penetrates to great depth on large numbers of subject. A well written and interesting argument, the author manages to link a wide range of arguments. I really enjoyed this book.

This book originally apeared in the prespectives in cognitive neuroscience series in 1993, and is the best introduction and review into the subject of hemispheric asymmetry. My earlier concerns were that it was a bit dated, but it is a cornerstone in the field nevertheless.
Hellige points out that every model of hemispheric asymmetry will have to deal with five main points: The cognitive differences between individuals, general computation diferences between hemispheres, the view of the brain as an integrated unit, the development and evolution of hemispheric asymmetry and the fact that there is asymmetry in other species as well.
The book presents extensive data and studies that illuminate aspects of all of these points, and much more. Speculation is reserved for evolutionary discussions, but the author makes sure to present only hard evidence, and to warn the reader when there is controversy. It is not very technical, and for that it is a better exposition of such a complex subject.
Now the best parts of the book are when the author sets out to undermine (still current) popular beliefs about hemispheric asymmetry. There is no simple way to say that there are right or left brained people. This is a gross simplifiation of the facts. For example, Hellige notes that since every task uses multicomponent processing and modules, and since it regullarily activate distribuited locations of both hemisphers, there is no clear division within tasks of hemisphers (perhaps with the exeption of language). Sure, there is metacontrol, but that is another interesting subject. There is also no single dichtonomy between modes of processing of diferent hemisphers. Sayng that left is analytic and linguistic and right visuospatial is another gross simplification. Computation styles vary between tasks themselves. Finally, it is also not the case that there only exists hemispheric asymmetry in humans because of language and tool use. There is evidence for it in rats, birds, old world monkeys, among other species.
This is a great book from a great series, very informative, direct, uncontroversial, as well as a good read. Anyone interested in neurosciences at all should enjoy it. IT is also conforting to see hard science taking the spotlight and not cheap self help psychology. Maybe it is my left brain speaking.

Hellige does a superb job of reviewing the field of hemispheric asymmetry. This book is well written and has much to offer to the serious researcher or just the laymen interested in the brain.

I am looking forward to a new edition, that will include the more recent research on the topic.

This is the 1978 edition of a book that was updated and re-published in 1990! It is rather silly that anyone is even offering the old edition for sale.
The paperback (pub in 1991) is available and for sale at a lower price!

Actually, the 1990 edition is somewhat behind the times in its sections on elementary particle physics, etc., and it is past time for this book to be updated again.

While the author has undertaken an ambitious topic, it is not clear that the thesis really provides any new insights to the topic. The notion that phonological contrasts are preserved at (morphological, prosodic, or syllable) edges is an old one dating back to (at least) Trubetzkoy. It has received more recent discussion as well, including the work of Donca Steriade.

The author provides an Optimality Theoretic (OT) analysis of this tendency by via the faithfulness family of constraints. Essentially, constraints that require faithfulness are more ardently enforced at edges of phonological phrases, roots, words, or syllables.

Trubetzkoy and Steriade attribute the phenomenon to the observation that phonetic contrasts are more salient in onset position than in a complex coda. Aside from encoding this observation in OT, I don't see that this thesis contributes much to our understanding of the phenomenon.

The fact that morphological edges emerge as "special" in some languages raises an interesting question as to what edges are most important. For example, the author discusses at length the fact that in the Bantu language Shona, more contrasts are found in the first stem vowel (position) than in subsequent vowels. The author attributes this to positional faithfulness-i.e., the height of the first stem vowel is more faithfully maintained than subsequent vowels. As this is a case of a morphological edge (verb stems in Shona, like all Bantu languages, are proceeded by subject and tense prefixes in all but a few contexts, such as commands), one might be tempted to say that Stem Faithfulness outranks word faithfulness. Unfortunately, in other Bantu languages, high vowel suffixes alter the height of stem vowels. Thus, in KiKuria, the agentive suffix [i] raises the stem vowel. We can only conclude that in KiKuria, Stem Faithfulness is outranked by other faithfulness constraints (specifically, those that determine that suffix vowel height).

Romance provides another example; word final vowels (other than [a]) in Portuguese are raised to high. One could attribute this to the relative low ranking of faithfulness for word final vowels in Portuguese. In other Romance languages, including many dialects of Italian, high vowel suffixes alter the quality of stem vowels (even if the suffix is word final). In these languages, then, it appears that faithfulness for word-final vowels is highly ranked.

These questions beg the question as to what generalizations can be made of positional faithfulness. Should we expect one type of faithfulness constraint to be highly ranked throughout a family (contra the examples cited above), or can any language rank all types of positional faithfulness freely (as the above examples suggest)? If the answer is more like the latter, I wonder, what has this thesis contributed to the discussion? If the answer is more like the latter, I wonder, what has this thesis contributed to the discussion?