In our everyday lives, as well as at the level of fundamental physics, symmetries play an important role. Human bodies have an approximate bilateral symmetry, or symmetry down the middle, and we judge more symmetric faces to be more visually appealing. Some animals, like starfish, have multiple lines of symmetry, as well as a rotational symmetry, where you can spin it by a certain angle (or set of angles) and it appears identical to the original. But in physics, there are extra kinds of symmetries that we don’t encounter conventionally: not just reflections, rotations, and translations, but discrete and continuous symmetries that are wholly divorced from our intuition and experience. Can we break them down in ways that are understandable, even to a non-physicist? That’s the question of Shiloh Paul, who asks: “I’m curious about the concept of ‘symmetries’ in physics. I still picture symmetry the grade school way – can you fold a piece of paper on top of itself? But when I try to understand symmetries in physics, which are apparently super fundamental, I …