Now the next question, which is going to concern us for most of the rest of this chapter, is the question of symmetry under reflection in space. The problem is this: Are the physical laws symmetrical under reflection? We may put it this way: Suppose we build a piece of equipment, let us say a clock, with lots of wheels and hands and numbers; it ticks, it works, and it has things wound up inside. We look at the clock in the mirror. How it looks in the mirror is not the question. But let us actually build another clock which is exactly the same as the first clock looks in the mirror—every time there is a screw with a right-hand thread in one, we use a screw with a left-hand thread in the corresponding place of the other; where one is marked “2” on the face, we mark a on the face of the other; each coiled spring is twisted one way in one clock and the other way in the mirror-image clock; when we are all finished, we have two clocks, both physical, which bear to each other the relation of an object and its mirror image, although they are both actual, material objects, we emphasize. Now the question is: If the two clocks are started in the same condition, the springs wound to corresponding tightnesses, will the two clocks tick and go around, forever after, as exact mirror images? (This is a physical question, not a philosophical question.) Our intuition about the laws of physics would suggest that they would.

We would suspect that, at least in the case of these clocks, reflection in space is one of the symmetries of physical laws, that if we change everything from “right” to “left” and leave it otherwise the same, we cannot tell the difference. Let us, then, suppose for a moment that this is true. If it is true, then it would be impossible to distinguish “right” and “left” by any physical phenomenon, just as it is, for example, impossible to define a particular absolute velocity by a physical phenomenon. So it should be impossible, by any physical phenomenon, to define absolutely what we mean by “right” as opposed to “left,” because the physical laws should be symmetrical.

Of course, the world does not have to be symmetrical. For example, using what we may call “geography,” surely “right” can be defined. For instance, we stand in New Orleans and look at Chicago, and Florida is to our right (when our feet are on the ground!). So we can define “right” and “left” by geography. Of course, the actual situation in any system does not have to have the symmetry that we are talking about; it is a question of whether the laws are symmetrical—in other words, whether it is against the physical laws to have a sphere like the earth with “left-handed dirt” on it and a person like ourselves standing looking at a city like Chicago from a place like New Orleans, but with everything the other way around, so Florida is on the other side. It clearly seems not impossible, not against the physical laws, to have everything changed left for right.

Another point is that our definition of “right” should not depend on history. An easy way to distinguish right from left is to go to a machine shop and pick up a screw at random. The odds are it has a right-hand thread—not necessarily, but it is much more likely to have a right-hand thread than a left-hand one. This is a question of history or convention, or the way things happen to be, and is again not a question of fundamental laws. As we can well appreciate, everyone could have started out making left-handed screws!

So we must try to find some phenomenon in which “right hand” is involved fundamentally. The next possibility we discuss is the fact that polarized light rotates its plane of polarization as it goes through, say, sugar water. As we saw in Chapter 33, it rotates, let us say, to the right in a certain sugar solution. That is a way of defining “right-hand,” because we may dissolve some sugar in the water and then the polarization goes to the right. But sugar has come from living things, and if we try to make the sugar artificially, then we discover that it does not rotate the plane of polarization! But if we then take that same sugar which is made artificially and which does not rotate the plane of polarization, and put bacteria in it (they eat some of the sugar) and then filter out the bacteria, we find that we still have sugar left (almost half as much as we had before), and this time it does rotate the plane of polarization, but the other way! It seems very confusing, but is easily explained.

Fig. 52–1. (a) L-alanine (left), and (b) D-alanine (right).

Take another example: One of the substances which is common to all living creatures and that is fundamental to life is protein. Proteins consist of chains of amino acids. Figure 52–1 shows a model of an amino acid that comes out of a protein. This amino acid is called alanine, and the molecular arrangement would look like that in Fig. 52–1(a) if it came out of a protein of a real living thing. On the other hand, if we try to make alanine from carbon dioxide, ethane, and ammonia (and we can make it, it is not a complicated molecule), we discover that we are making equal amounts of this molecule and the one shown in Fig. 52–1(b)! The first molecule, the one that comes from the living thing, is called L-alanine. The other one, which is the same chemically, in that it has the same kinds of atoms and the same connections of the atoms, is a “right-hand” molecule, compared with the “left-hand” L-alanine, and it is called D-alanine. The interesting thing is that when we make alanine at home in a laboratory from simple gases, we get an equal mixture of both kinds. However, the only thing that life uses is L-alanine. (This is not exactly true. Here and there in living creatures there is a special use for D-alanine, but it is very rare. All proteins use L-alanine exclusively.) Now if we make both kinds, and we feed the mixture to some animal which likes to “eat,” or use up, alanine, it cannot use D-alanine, so it only uses the L-alanine; that is what happened to our sugar—after the bacteria eat the sugar that works well for them, only the “wrong” kind is left! (Left-handed sugar tastes sweet, but not the same as right-handed sugar.)

So it looks as though the phenomena of life permit a distinction between “right” and “left,” or chemistry permits a distinction, because the two molecules are chemically different. But no, it does not! So far as physical measurements can be made, such as of energy, the rates of chemical reactions, and so on, the two kinds work exactly the same way if we make everything else in a mirror image too. One molecule will rotate light to the right, and the other will rotate it to the left in precisely the same amount, through the same amount of fluid. Thus, so far as physics is concerned, these two amino acids are equally satisfactory. So far as we understand things today, the fundamentals of the Schrödinger equation have it that the two molecules should behave in exactly corresponding ways, so that one is to the right as the other is to the left. Nevertheless, in life it is all one way!

It is presumed that the reason for this is the following. Let us suppose, for example, that life is somehow at one moment in a certain condition in which all the proteins in some creatures have left-handed amino acids, and all the enzymes are lopsided—every substance in the living creature is lopsided—it is not symmetrical. So when the digestive enzymes try to change the chemicals in the food from one kind to another, one kind of chemical “fits” into the enzyme, but the other kind does not (like Cinderella and the slipper, except that it is a “left foot” that we are testing). So far as we know, in principle, we could build a frog, for example, in which every molecule is reversed, everything is like the “left-hand” mirror image of a real frog; we have a left-hand frog. This left-hand frog would go on all right for a while, but he would find nothing to eat, because if he swallows a fly, his enzymes are not built to digest it. The fly has the wrong “kind” of amino acids (unless we give him a left-hand fly). So as far as we know, the chemical and life processes would continue in the same manner if everything were reversed.

If life is entirely a physical and chemical phenomenon, then we can understand that the proteins are all made in the same corkscrew only from the idea that at the very beginning some living molecules, by accident, got started and a few won. Somewhere, once, one organic molecule was lopsided in a certain way, and from this particular thing the “right” happened to evolve in our particular geography; a particular historical accident was one-sided, and ever since then the lopsidedness has propagated itself. Once having arrived at the state that it is in now, of course, it will always continue—all the enzymes digest the right things, manufacture the right things: when the carbon dioxide and the water vapor, and so on, go in the plant leaves, the enzymes that make the sugars make them lopsided because the enzymes are lopsided. If any new kind of virus or living thing were to originate at a later time, it would survive only if it could “eat” the kind of living matter already present. Thus it, too, must be of the same kind.

There is no conservation of the number of right-handed molecules. Once started, we could keep increasing the number of right-handed molecules. So the presumption is, then, that the phenomena in the case of life do not show a lack of symmetry in physical laws, but do show, on the contrary, the universal nature and the commonness of ultimate origin of all creatures on earth, in the sense described above.