String theory offers a unified framework in which the fundamental constituents of nature are one-dimensional objects whose vibrational modes give rise to particles and forces. By embedding gravity ...

The gauge bosons of the standard model of particle physics are responsible for three of the four known forces in the universe ...

String theory's equations give rise to a near infinite variety of potential universes in a 'landscape.' This landscape is surrounded by a 'swampland' of solutions that are incompatible with any ...

Physicists may have uncovered a surprising new clue that string theory—the idea that the universe is built from unimaginably tiny vibrating strings—could be more than just a mathematical fantasy.

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?” Hawking, who later became my ...

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. Reading time 7 minutes ...

If you could take an apple and break it into smaller and smaller parts, you would find molecules, then atoms, followed by subatomic particles like protons and the quarks and gluons that make them up.

A new physics paper takes a step toward creating a long-sought "theory of everything" by uniting gravity with the quantum world. However, the new theory remains far from being proven observationally.

String field theory is a second-quantised framework that recasts the perturbative dynamics of strings in terms of field-theoretic variables on the space of string configurations. By organising ...