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 ...

Scientists seeking the secrets of the universe would like to make a model that shows how all of nature’s forces and particles fit together. It would be nice to do it with Legos. But perhaps a better ...

Heterotic string theory remains a captivating framework in the pursuit of unifying quantum mechanics with gravity. By merging aspects of bosonic and supersymmetric strings, it provides a fertile ...

Moduli spaces form the mathematical framework for categorising the diverse solutions characteristic of string theory, providing a systematic means to parameterise the various vacuum configurations ...

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 ...

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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 theorists are shifting focus to solve some rather sticky problems in physics. Over the past few years, string theory has been less about trying to find a unifying description of all forces and ...

Einstein introduced the cosmological constant to his equations of general relativity because he believed the universe was static. Faced with evidence that the universe was actually expanding, however, ...

String theory proposes that the fundamental constituents of the universe are one-dimensional “strings” rather than point-like particles. What we perceive as particles are actually vibrations in loops ...

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 ...