Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 426
CHIRALITY OR SIDEDNESS IN NATURE moulds which have no known sensory organs; all they have is a diffused sense of awareness?. This amazing tale of chirality in nature does not end here. It just begins. Since the time of Pasteur, research on chirality has made tremendous progress and many more extremely perplexing examples have come to light testifying that chirality can be unmistakably detected by different species of life. . By now chirality is discovered to operate at every level of material existence. Yet the manner of how and why it so behaves is far from understood. Until 1957 it was believed that the four fundamental forces which govern the interaction of elementary particles were parity conserving. . This simply means that all particles at elementary level had chiral-symmetry. However, in 1957 Chien-Shiung Wu and her colleagues at Columbia University discovered that beta particles emitted from radioactive nuclei did not display chiral-symmetry. The left-handed electrons far outnumbered the right-handed ones. It was further discovered that the tiniest subatomic particles, neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, which are electrically neutral and move at the speed of light, also display a certain spin. But unlike electrons which predominantly prefer left-handed spin, anti-neutrinos are always partial to the right-hand. The contrary is not found in nature. No one knows why chiralasymmetry exists at such fundamental levels of existence at all. . Many hypotheses are being presented but most are found to be simply preposterous when examined more minutely. However, there is one suggestion which seems to have provided scientists with a clue to the factor possibly at work at the most rudimentary level of chirality in nature. . Yet at this level, it is too ethereal to be demonstrated or verified. It is related to a theory which unifies the weak and 415