Content about “
symmetry

Article

The Higgs boson

And finally, here is how the famous Higgs boson gets into the picture.
Article

Maths in a minute: Symmetry

We all instinctively recognise symmetry when we see it, but describing it in words is harder than you might think.
Article

Order behind chaos

We all know what symmetry is. But why does it play such a central role in modern physics?
Article

Problems of gravity

Why (some) physicists want to modify Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Article

Breaking symmetry

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?
News story

Rotation revolution

The laws of symmetry are unforgiving, but a team of researchers from the US have come up with a pattern-producing technique that seems to cheat them. The new technique is called moiré nanolithography and the researchers hope that it will find useful applications in the production of solar panels and many other optical devices.
Article
Detail of M-theory multiple, Grenville Davey. Image © Isaac Newton Institute

String Theory, Duality and Art: how the Higgs boson and Turner Prize collide

On the face of it, an artist and a theoretical physicist might seem an unlikely pairing. But Turner Prize-winning sculptor Grenville Davey and string theorist David Berman's collaboration is producing beautiful, thought-provoking work inspired by the fundamental structure of the Universe. Julia Hawkins interviewed them to find out more about how the Higgs boson and T-duality are giving rise to art.
Article
Design

Secret symmetry and the Higgs boson (Part II)

In the first part of this article we explored Landau's theory of phase transitions in materials such as magnets. We now go on to see how this theory formed the basis of the Higgs mechanism, which postulates the existence of the mysterious Higgs boson and explains how the particles that make up our Universe came to have mass.