Caption: Liesegang rocks, discovered in the nearby River Nith, are an example of “symmetry breaking”, a basic truth of the universe. These beautiful ugly rocks were
formed of sandstone when iron deposits broke the overall unified symmetry of white sand and pulsated in red concentric circles. The patterns have a similar form
and origin to the famous chemical reaction Belousov-Zhabotinskii and the circles and spirals of the self-organizing slime mold. Here, the rocks are mounted on brass
plates whose flat identical symmetry has been broken by simple operations: bending, heating, hitting, etc. An iconography emerges to reveal an interesting discovery
of our time. It is not just to beautiful symmetrical shapes like a circle that we owe the interest of our universe, but to symmetry breaking. No breaking, no history of
the universe - nothing but dull identity.
One Clue in the Garden - Self-Organizing Harmonies
Beyond the mechanistic and theistic traditions is a third understanding that is barely 20 years old, although it has many precedents. Partly it comes from what are
called the new sciences of complexity, and it finds that most everything in the universe is self-organising - following one harmonic pattern or another. This quality of
self-organization gives things identity, beauty, and coherence. It makes them semi-autonomous and valuable and, to a degree, it extends even to inanimate matter.
Chemical reactions pulsate, storms self-organize, and both form rhythmical structures such as the spiral, a form I have used repeatedly throughout the garden.
[2 paras about spirals]
Over many years of evolution, of trial and error, nature discovered deeper cosmic patterns such as the spiral and then exploited them. Natural selection may have
fine-tuned the process, built the perfect angle of the Fibonacci spiral comes from the pre-existing geometry of space occupation. In effect, the universe has preordering possibilities before natural selection ever gets to work. Cosmogenesis produces pattern, harmony, and organized complexity before there is life.
This is what one of the leading complexity scientists, Stuart Kauffman, calls “order for free” but because it is so important and because it contradicts the principle of
increasing disorder or decline (entropy) and other truths the Modernists brought to the fore, it should perhaps have a single term. Another investigator, Gyorgy
Doczi, calls it “dinergy”, a new word made up from the Greek dia, meaning “across, through, opposite”, and ‘energy’ for the creative energy of organic growth.
Actually, self-organizing patterns emerge out of the universe and its laws: they are present, curiously, before nature or behind nature. They give it and us identity,
dignity, semi-autonomy. They may predispose the universe to evolve along one path rather than another - almost, if not quite, in a purposeful direction. For me they
are a source of great wonder and awe. A fitting icon for a garden.
As luck would have it I have even found good examples of such pattern formation in inorganic structures right underfoot, in the River Nith. This fast-running
salmon and trout waterway flows very close to the garden. From this ever-changing current, strange Liesegang rocks can be fished, and they can be turned
into icons of self-organization. Such icons afford one clue to the meaning of the garden that “symmetry breaking” is as important as “symmetry making”....
Einstein said “God is subtle but not malicious.” The laws of the universe do not change capriciously, but need teasing out. A garden should represent a
corresponding puzzle to be fathomed, some things very clear and others veiled.
The implications of the new science of complexity are so important that they became explicit, the underlying theme for the garden, and my wife and I used
them to speculate on and celebrate the law of the universe - subtle, complex, beautiful but not malicious.