The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 2: Symmetry and Asymmetry

In his second Sophia Lecture, Dr Iain McGilchrist gives a bracing, counterintuitive account of the fundamental categories of our experience of the world.

McGilchrist shows how fundamental binaries—such as stasis and motion, simplicity and complexity, order and randomness, and even straight lines and curves—do not occur in nature in ways that conform to our assumptions about an inert, independent, and predictable universe.

Drawing from disciplines as disparate as physics, mathematics, biology and art, McGilchrist shows that asymmetry is not simply a principle of vitality, harmony, and beauty. McGilchrist argues that asymmetry is primary, a reality that is prior to symmetry and which forms the basis of the very symmetries in nature and the arts to which it gives rise. The dynamism which results from the drive to balance and to resist balance is at the root of the vigor of natural systems, the beauty that they embody, and which the arts then reflect.

With examples ranging from the elegance of the golden ratio to the structure of the human brain, McGilchrist’s lecture offers a fresh perspective on the nature of patterns in complex systems and human creations. His work invites us to search for wholeness, harmony, and connection from a set of starting points which are as surprising as they are fruitful; as always, he challenges us to see our world in new—and newly unified—ways.

Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Johann Sebastian Bach
• John Donne - “Holy Sonnet 7: At the round earth’s imagin’d corners”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins - “Carrion Comfort”
• Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations with Einstein, Planck, Dirac, Bohr, and Other Physicists of Our Time
• Alexander Pope - “The Rape of the Lock”
• Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary
• Pierre Curie
• Chien-Shiung Wu
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Aesop
• Heraclitus
• Democritus
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Louis Pasteur
• Rong Li & Bruce Bowerman - “Symmetry breaking in biology”
• Arthur Koestler
• Aristotle
• Oliver Sacks
• Thomas Holstein
• Tim Crow
• Onur Güntürkün
• Jane Clark & Daniel Simons (Christopher Chabris) - Gorillas in Our Midst
• Jonathan Rowson
• Alastair McIntosh
• Richard Dawkins
• Nikolaj Nikolaenko
• Luciano Laurana
• Giorgio Martini - Ideal City
• Raphael - The School of Athens
• Andrea Palladio
• William Blake - “The Tyger”
• Theodosius II
• Christ Pantocrator
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• John P. McGovern
• William Osler
• William Alwyn Lishman
• William Shakespeare - King Lear
• John Cleese
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Sir Roger Scruton