"There is nothing mysterious about spontaneous symmetry breaking. There are many examples in physics. Hold a drinking straw between the palms of your hands and you have a physical system that can be described by equations possessing rotational symmetry. Press your palms together and the straw bends. The symmetry is broken. You cannot necessarily predict how the straw will bend; it could bend "up," "down," "sideways," or in any other direction. This unsymmetrical situation, however, is the stable solution of perfectly symmetrical equations."