The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Luca Giomi still remembers the time when, as a young graduate student, he watched two videos of droplets streaming from an inkjet ...

Relating Noether’s theorem to introductory concepts like Newton’s laws can give students an early appreciation of its impact.

We’ve known about gravity since Newton’s apocryphal encounter with the apple, but we’re still struggling to make sense of it. While the other three forces of nature are all due to the activity of ...

Success for Robert Zimmer is defined differently these days. As the president of the University of Chicago since 2006, he’s made headlines for landing nine-figure financial gifts and writing op-eds in ...

Ordered materials with 7-fold, 9-fold or 11-fold symmetries are never observed in nature. Researchers discovered the reason for this when they tried to impose a 7-fold symmetry on a layer of charged ...

In the last century, physicists have learned to formulate physics laws and guess new laws of nature using a nontrivial tool. This tool is the use of symmetry principles. Physicists impose certain ...

Researchers are investigating symmetry violations in an effort to shed light on new physics. A recent paper reports progress on synthesizing and detecting ions that are among the most sensitive ...

Physicists have been busy exploring how our universe might emerge like a hologram out of a two-dimensional sheet. New clues have come from the symmetries found on an infinitely distant “celestial ...