Right and Left

The teacher asks the class: “Those who know the answer to my question raise your hand”. Instantly and instinctively those who know the answer raise their right hand. We look at the one that raised his left hand and conclude that something must not be right with his right hand. It never occurs to us that he could be left-handed.

In this world there is right and wrong as well as well as right and left. For instance, the car steering wheel in our country is to the right whereas elsewhere it is to the left. More importantly, perhaps, we keep to the left while they keep to the right. Who is right? The question, of course, makes no sense. Let us admit it. This is a right-hander's world. We shake hands with our right hand, we vote with our right hand, we write with our right hand and we even swear with our right hand. The whole world appears to have been designed for the right-hander. Just look at the knobs on refrigerators or TV controls or where the hip pocket in our trousers is. All these seem to prove only one thing—that the designer himself is right handed!

We are so used to the right that in sports like cricket, or tennis, the mere presence of a single left-hander is particularly taken note of. We forget that he is the one that needs sympathy since he has to face right –handers nearly all the time. Why do we make such a big fuss over right wing and left wing when we know for sure that we need both wings to fly? And in an auto accident what matters is not who is right but who is left.

When we are aware of so much disparity between right and left in this world, it appears surprising for physicists to have assumed that nature is symmetric. It is, therefore, difficult to comprehend and appreciate that the coveted Nobel Prize in Physics’ went to Lee and Yang in 1957 for telling the world that there is difference between right and left, something we have known all along!