Making and breaking symmetries in mind and life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Symmetry is a motif featuring in almost all areas of science. Symmetries appear throughout the natural world, making them particularly important in our quest to understand the structure of the world around us. Symmetries and invariances are often first principles pointing to some lawful description of an observation, with explanations being understood as both ‘satisfying’ and potentially useful in their regularity. The sense of aesthetic beauty accompanying such explanations is reminiscent of our understanding of intelligence in terms of the ability to efficiently predict (or compress) data; indeed, identifying and building on symmetry can offer a particularly elegant description of a physical situation. The study of symmetries is so fundamental to mathematics and physics that one might ask where else it proves useful. This theme issue poses the question: what does the study of symmetry, and symmetry breaking, have to offer for the study of life and the mind?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".