Left is also right

When you hand over a pencil to your toddler, check it with both his/her hands. Check the handedness.  When I was admitted in school, the pencil was placed between the fingers of my right hand. I began writing everything from right to left.

All of it would go wrong except urdu which flows to left.  I would comb my hair from right to left, tilt my cap to left and make all sorts of anticlockwise acts.  To my teachers and elders, I was disoriented, and thus disdained.

For the first few years in school, I spent most of the time outside the classroom.  My teachers made lot of efforts to orient me right. Yet as an adult girl for the first time, I hung my dupatta on the opposite side and was sufficiently laughed at by my friends. Nonetheless, today I am rightly right. Handedness is the tendency to use either of the two hands and accordingly we are labeled as right-handed or left-handed.

Today on August 13, we observe the International left hander’s day across the globe to recognize and appreciate the uniqueness of left-handed people in a world numerically dominated by righties. Notwithstanding their lesser number, the lefties are no less privileged than their right-handed peers in garnering the bounties of life; be it the cricketing legends like Braine Lara; athletes like Diego Maradona, Pele, and Lionel Messi; the business tycoon like Ratan Tata, the big B of Bollywood, Amitab Bachan or the Hollywood legend, Morgan Freeman.

Some recently known American presidents like Clinton and Obama have also been left-handed.  Bill Gates is a lefty, and so was his late rival and friend, Steve Jobs. Leonardo da Vinci is probably one of the most famous left-handed artists of all time.

So was Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on moon, left-handed. Napoleon Bonaparte had objected to the time-honored military practice of marching on the left side of the road with weapons ready in the right hand because it put lefties like him at a strategic disadvantage.

There must be N number of more such examples with whom I am not familiar.  While as, being left-handed or right-handed is for biologists to explain, physicists are interested in a different domain of things. As a general case, left and right are orientations only, flipped by a mirror. Otherwise, they may essentially mean the same thing.

However, this is not a whole truth since nature does not have equal preferences for both configurations at all times. To begin with, our earth is a lefty, rotating from west to east and not the other way round. So is our solar system. As per a study of NASA reported in July 2011 by Tammy Plotner, a professional astronomy author, there are an excess of counter-clockwise rotating or what we call left-handed spiral galaxies compared to their right-handed counterparts. Similar findings were reported earlier also, for instance by the web-based Galaxy Zoo project in November of 2007.

The most abundant material particles, neutrinos, which are literally jam-packing the Universe, are also left handed. Their right handed versions could never be found. In all, one can say that our Universe has a net left-handed character.

Other than gravitation, there are three fundamental forces operating in nature. Out of these, the nuclear force operating between the nucleons and the electromagnetic forces operating between the charges, are left-right symmetric.

But there is a fourth force known as weak force responsible for radioactive decays which breaks this symmetry. An experimental confirmation of the same was carried out by a Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu which won her the prestigious Wolf Prize in 1978.

While humans are predominantly right-handed, nature is left-handed. This is a sufficient reason for lefties to cherish and celebrate their handedness. Roughly ten percent of people are left-handed, but the neural basis of handedness has been unclear.

Handedness and cerebral asymmetry are not only variable, they are also imperfectly related. It is pertinent to mention that more than 98% of right-handers are left brained and so are 70% of the right-handers. Only 30% of them are such that both their cerebral hemispheres are equally capable.

Life on earth has also a greater degree of lefty flavor than righty. In that context, for example, the amino acids which are the basic building blocks of life are found to be left-handed. The functional unit in our body, our heart, is in the left side while it could also have probably worked well in the right side.  Before anything else, comes the question as to why are there any preferences, schemes and selections in nature.

Why does something happen in one way and not the other way which was also equally likely to happen. Why is left-handedness the preferred orientation of nature? Well, there is no ready answer to it but the efforts are on from molecular to astronomical approaches. Till there are any concrete answers, we can choose to believe in the fair selection of nature which tends to be the best. As Einstein had once said, ‘I am at all levels convinced that God does not play dice.’

Meanwhile life on earth continues to be as lopsided as ever.

Dr. Qudsia Gani is Head, Department of Physics, GDC Pattan, Baramulla.