Hidden Symmetry and Genericity

In Chapter 6 we discussed ways in which symmetries can be modeling assumptions in physical systems, and we framed this discussion specifically in terms of models of the Couette-Taylor experiment and the Belousov-Zhabotinskii experiment. We saw that symmetries may be exact, at least for modeling purposes, or they may be approximate. In models of the Couette-Taylor experiment, approximate symmetries appear because we assume periodic boundary conditions in the axial direction; in models of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii experiment they appear because we assume an infinitely large domain. We saw that model-independent results — those that depend only on the symmetries of the model — tell us a great deal about transitions that are actually seen in experiments. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.