Symmetry

Lab Libs

‘Tis the season for friends, family and funny physics fill-ins. Here at Symmetry, we’ve taken a page from Mad Libs, those short stories designed to trick you into learning parts of speech, and created some science-themed Lab Libs (to trick you into learning science). Simply fill in the blanks to create original science stories.

REFUGES, started by physicist Tino Nyawelo, aims to give refugees and other underrepresented groups the tools to succeed in STEM. Although the program is focused on increasing diversity in STEM disciplines, the overall goal is to address the academic and cultural difficulties that refugee youth face in Utah.

Physics books of 2018

Symmetry writer Mike Perricone presents his annual compilation of new popular science books related to particle physics and astrophysics. The array that Symmetry readers might have encountered in 2018 ranges from the philosophical to the whimsical.

Top quark couture

The mentorship of a scientist on the CMS experiment meant everything to Evan Coleman, a former physics undergraduate at Brown University. What do you give a physicist who helped discover a fundamental particle and jump-started your science career? Something individual, artistic and science-themed.

A proton describes its final moments in the Large Hadron Collider. During its second run, between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN collided about 16 million billion particle pairs. This 3-minute animation is the story of one of them.

View of Large Hadron Collider

During the last four years, LHC scientists have filled in gaps in our knowledge and tested the boundaries of the Standard Model. Since the start of Run II in March 2015, they’ve recorded an incredible amount of data —five times more than the LHC produced in Run I. The accelerator produced approximately 16 million billion proton-proton collisions — about one collision for every ant currently living on Earth.

During the short heavy-ion run at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, every moment counts. As one scientist puts it, experimenters have “four weeks to collect all the data we will use for the next three years.” The data arising from LHC’s collisions of heavy nuclei, such as lead, will be used to study the properties of a very hot and dense subatomic material called the quark-gluon plasma.

Gravitational lenses

Predicted by Einstein and discovered in 1979, gravitational lensing helps astrophysicists understand the evolving shape of the universe.