Flawed conservation laws are consequences of a much deeper principle: Noether’s theorem. Conservation laws are among the most important tools in physics. They feel as fundamental as you can get. And ...

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 ...

Symmetry is a powerful framework to perceive and predict the physical world. The structure of materials is described by a combination of rotations, rotation-inversions and translational symmetries. By ...

We are fond of saying things are symmetric, but what does that really mean? Intuitively we have a sense of symmetry as a kind of mirroring. Suppose we draw a vertical line through the middle of a ...

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 ...