To U.S. academicians, Peter Kapitza also stood as a symbol—a living symbol of science’s lost internationalism. Contact us at letters@time.com ...

Viewed as a symbol, consciousness is very much like many of the other grand ideas of science. An atom is not so much a thing as an idea, a symbol for matter’s ultimate constituents, and the ...

The names of all the elements discovered in the past half-century correspond pretty closely with their symbols—especially in English, which has emerged as the lingua franca of science.