String theory, simultaneously one of the most promising and controversial ideas in modern physics, may be more capable of helping probe the inner workings of subatomic particles than was previously ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a ...

In October 1984 I arrived at Oxford University, trailing a large steamer trunk containing a couple of changes of clothing and about five dozen textbooks. I had a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in ...

It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the very tough job of fitting gravity into the quantum laws of nature in such a way that, on large scales, gravity looks like curves in the ...

WASHINGTON — Reality comes in layers. Everything we see in the world around us, scientists tell us, is made of atoms and combinations of atoms called molecules. Atoms are themselves made of tiny ...

Physicists who have been roaming the “landscape” of string theory—the space of zillions and zillions of mathematical solutions of the theory, where each solution provides the kinds of equations ...

In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called "Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?" Forty-five years later, ...

It's one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in all of physics: string theory. At the heart of string theory is the thread of an idea that's run through physics for centuries, that ...

Stop. Look around. All things, visible or not, are made of particles so tiny that many find their sizes difficult to comprehend. Far removed from our everyday experiences, they move at rapid speeds ...

String theory is a purported theory of everything that physicists hope will one day explain … everything. All the forces, all the particles, all the constants, all the things under a single ...

Since the 1980s, string theory has emerged as the leading candidate for achieving every physicist’s dream: reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics and thereby finding a tidy explanation ...

The idea of String Theory is that our Universe came from a higher-dimensional, more symmetric, more complex state with an enormous number of degrees of freedom. In order for String Theory to be solved ...