Physicists love symmetry, but they get even more excited about symmetry breaking. They even believe that many of the features of the world we live in are a result of it. What do they mean by that?

Imagine a circle with radius 1 cm rolling completely along the circumference of a circle with radius 4 cm. How many rotations did the smaller circle make? Be prepared for a surprise!

We might have found the Higgs boson, but the search for new physics at the LHC isn't over yet.

One thing that makes TV game shows fun to watch is that there's usually an element of luck involved. But how (un)lucky is (un)lucky? We look at the probabilities of two popular examples.

Why does time have a direction?

To create energy from information you would need to break the second law of thermodynamics — that's impossible in the real world, but could theories that do break it shed light on why nature is the way it is?

Like spirals and flowers? Then you'll love polar coordinates and the pretty pictures they allow you to draw!

By the 1970s physicists had successfully tamed three of the fundamental forces using a sophisticated construct called quantum field theory. The trouble was that the framework seemed to fall apart when you looked at very high or very low energy scales. So how could these be thought of as valid theories? It's a question physicists are still grappling with today.

Can we always find order in systems that are disordered? If so, just how large does a system have to be to contain a certain amount of order?