It culminates in a discussion of whether nature's conservation of parity (the symmetry of mirrored quantum systems) is ever violated, which had been proven experimentally in 1956.

The third edition was released in 1990 under the title The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings; this was re-released with minor revisions in 2005.

The book begins with the subject of mirror reflection, and from there passes through symmetry in geometry, poetry, art, music, galaxies, stars, planets and living organisms.

At a conference earlier that year, Richard Feynman had asked (on behalf of Martin M. Block) whether parity was sometimes violated, leading Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang to propose Wu's experiment, for which Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the original 1964 edition of The Ambidextrous Universe, Gardner quoted two lines of poetry from Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire which are supposed to have been written by a poet, "John Shade", who is actually fictional.

In his 1969 novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Nabokov returned the favor by having the character Van Veen "quote" the Gardner book along with the two lines of verse: "Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears," says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher ("Martin Gardiner" [sic]) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165 [sic].