Some physicists think there is a unit of matter more fundamental than what has been experimentally confirmed to date. They think that everything in the universe is made of tiny vibrating strands of ...

Our universe may be fundamentally unstable. In a flash, the vacuum of space-time may find a new ground state, triggering a cataclysmic transformation of the physics of the universe. Or not. A new ...

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, ...

String theory has long been presented as physicists' best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the Universe. Yet, at the beginning of the 21st century, it became apparent that most ...

String theory attempts to unify all forces and particles in the universe using vibrating strings. It aims to explain the Standard Model of particle physics, which is incomplete. String theory predicts ...

For more than a century, physicists have suspected that the familiar three dimensions of space and one of time might be only a sliver of reality. Extra dimensions, if they exist, would not just be a ...

pt. 1. edge of knowledge -- ch. 1. Tied up with string -- pt. 2. Dilemma of space, time, and the quanta -- ch. 2. Space, time, and the eye of the beholder -- ch. 3. Of warps and ripples -- ch. 4.

Introduces string theory and shows how modern physics—composed of two theories that are ferociously incompatible—reached its schizophrenic impasse: One theory, general relativity, successfully ...

But despite its extraordinary popularity among some of the smartest people on the planet, string theory hasn’t been embraced by everyone–and now, nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash, some ...

The idea of a multiverse consisting of “parallel universes” is a popular science fiction trope, recently explored in the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, it is within ...