ABSTRACT
The more theoretical physicists penetrate the ultimate secrets of the microscopic nature of the universe, the more the grand design seems to be one of ultimate simplicity and ultimate symmetry. The most rigorously based, physics-oriented description of the growth of complexity out of simplicity is called the theory of broken symmetry. The concept was introduced by L. D. Landau to solve a series of problems related to the nature and meaning of thermodynamic phase transitions, but it also relates and explains many other properties of broken symmetry phases. Broken symmetry gives rise to the appearance of new length scales that did not exist in the symmetric phase. I. Prigogine and his school have made a series of attempts to build an analogy between the systems and the Landau free energy and its dependence on an order parameter, which leads to the important properties of equilibrium broken symmetry systems.
