When I was first learning to write, my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror. Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters. I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write. I have a mirror-written childhood…

Source

Every time I write about particle physics, I encounter a moment of uncertainty about a quantity that, at first glance, ought to be clear. How many kinds of elementary particles should I say there are? In experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, physicists smash together beams of protons, breaking them up into all possible elementary bits and pieces. Meanwhile, they have an incredibly accurate…

Source