> But last May, three physicists proved that the 1969 verdict was only half the story. It wasn’t just that the presupposed symmetry wasn’t there — it was that h

> But last May, three physicists proved that the 1969 verdict was only half the story. It wasn’t just that the presupposed symmetry wasn’t there — it was that higher symmetries were. And when those symmetries were incorporated into the theoretical picture, the predicted and observed decay rates matched exactly. … > [The] fractional quantum Hall effect, involves the spontaneous reorganization of electrons, but without any apparent symmetry being broken. This made it an uncomfortable outlier within the theory of phase transitions. That is, until a paper in 2018 by Xiao-Gang Wen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped establish that the quantum Hall effect does in fact break a symmetry — just not a traditional one.