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It would really help me with an idea I have if I could see how something such as a symmetric field could collapse to something asymmetric. I know that if $x$ occures before $y$ is symmetric, then $y$ occurs before $x$, which doesn't make sense if we take time to be asymmetric (only flowing in one direction). Is there a relationship between energy in the universe being symmetric, and the production of anti-matter asymmetric?

I am mostly interested in the collapse of the wavefunction, and a search to find if this collapse is asymmetric I am left with the thought that I might have to specify what the symmetry/asymmetry would be in respect to, that being said, is there some sort of "field" whether physical or purely abstract which is symmetric and if a "disturbance" (observation?) happens, there is a collapse to an asymmetric field such as the collapse of the wavefunction? Maybe I have it all wrong?

  • Digging deeper, what I am looking for examples of, especially of quantum systems is that of "symmetry breaking". I also found the answered question concerning spontaneous symmetry breaking in Quantum mechanics here: spontaneous symmetry breaking in Quantum Systems, and while I have some background in physics and pure math, I hope to get a much more canonical answer so as to understand more the foundations. \
Relative0
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  • Quoting part of the accepted answer concerning the link above:

    "The spontaneous symmetry breaking in the ground state of a quantum system can be defined as the long range entanglement between any two far-separated points in this system, in any ground state that preserves the global symmetries of the system."

    I am curious to know why the system goes from symmetry to asymmetry. I can understand the mutual information: $I_{12}=S_1+S_2-S_{12}$ but how does this work together with the breaking of symmetry?

    – Relative0 Apr 28 '14 at 04:56
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    Regarding the text in the bounty description, gravitational effects are not necessarily symmetric. Many solutions to the Einstein field equations possess a symmetry, e.g. $SO(3)$. However these ideal solutions rarely exist in Nature; perturbations will likely remove e.g. a spherical symmetry. – JamalS Apr 28 '14 at 07:15
  • Also, many exact solutions to Einstein's equations that have no symmetries are known. – Robin Ekman Apr 28 '14 at 10:02

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