6. Symmetry and Physics
When you consider plane tessellations where a single motif fills the whole
plane, you must separate the local pattern that you find in the tile and
that can be anything, from the global pattern created from the tiling.
This depends on the symmetry group used for the tiling.
In Physics the tile is a physical law.(If ,for you,the physical
law is an abstruse concept, than just think about a physical phenomenon
or better a machine built by man).This can be any law but instead symmetry reveals itself as a general law valid for infinite phenomena.You normally detect
it by observing that some measured quantity remains always the same (this is
like moving ourselves on our plane tiling measuring the single tiles and
constating that again and again we see the same tile).
Otherwise you
can see the symmetry as some global pattern in some "strange" space:for
example the elliptical orbit of planets moving around the Sun.
The ellipse is an overall pattern created (in part) from the fact that
the quantity angular momentum is the same everywhere or as physicists
say is conserved.
Conservation laws manifest the presence of symmetry in physical phenomena.
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