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 ...

String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force ...

The gauge bosons of the standard model of particle physics are responsible for three of the four known forces in the universe, conveyed through the exchange of virtual bosons. In electromagnetism, the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a ...

After 60 years, this beautiful theory hasn't produced many tangible results. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Paul M. Sutter is an ...

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 ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. He contributed this article to ...

At the turn of the century, it sounded as if string theory could give us big answers about the universe. Well… has it? String theorists, this one may be for you. The theorized object warps spacetime ...