Bryan W. Roberts (LSE): Curie’s hazard: From electromagnetism to symmetry violation

Abstract: We explore the facts and fiction regarding Curie’s own example of Curie’s principle, one of the more famous symmetry principles in modern science. Curie’s claim is vindicated in his suggested example of the electrostatics of central fields, but not without difficulty, and Curie’s claim turns out to fail in many others. Nevertheless, the failure of Curie’s claim is still of special empirical interest, in that it can be seen to underpin the experimental discovery of parity violation and of CP violation in the 20th century.