Symmetries and Symmetry Breaking

Abstract

In understanding the world of matter, the introduction of symmetry principles following experimentation or using the predictive power of symmetry principles to guide experimentation is most profound. The conservation of energy, linear momentum, angular momentum, charge, and CPT involve fundamental symmetries. All other conservation laws are valid within a restricted subspace of the four interactions: the strong, the electromagnetic, the weak, and the gravitational interaction. In this paper comments are made regarding parity violation in hadronic systems, charge symmetry breaking in two nucleon and few nucleon systems, and time-reversal-invariance in hadronic systems.

Comments: 5 Pages, LaTeX, 2 PostScript figures. Talk at 17th International IUPAP Conference on Few-body Problems in Physics, June 5-10, 2003, Durham, North Carolina, USA