Symmetry breaking and non-cell-autonomous growth rates in cancer

“You can’t step in the same river twice” might seem like an old aphorism of little value, but I think it is central to making sense of the sciences. This is especially clear if we rephrase it as: “you can’t do the same experiment twice”. After all, a replication experiment takes place at a different time, sometimes a different place, maybe done by a different experimenter. Why should any of the countless rules that governed the initial experiment still hold for the replicate? But our methodology demands that we must be able to repeat experiments. We achieve by making a series of symmetry assumptions. For example: the universality or homogeneity of physical laws. We can see this with early variants of the principle of sufficient reason in Anaximander and Aristotle. It developed closer to the modern statements with Galileo, Copernicus and Newton by pushing the laws of physics outside the sublunary sphere and suggesting that the planets follows the same laws as the apple. In fact, Alfred North Whitehead considered a belief in trustworthy uniformity of physical laws to be the defining feature of western philosophy (and science) since Thales.

In this post, I want to go through some of the symmetries we assume and how to break them. And I want to discuss this at levels from grand cosmology to the petri dish. In the process, I’ll touch on the fundamental constants of physics, how men stress out mice, and how standard experimental practices in cancer biology assume a cell-autonomous process symmetry.