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 ...

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 ...

For decades, physicists have been working with a theory called the "standard model" as a way to understand the mysteries of the universe. But the standard model is incomplete. Just last month the ...

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 ...

“Not even wrong” was Wolfgang Pauli’s ultimate put-down for any theory he considered wide of the mark. Here it is adopted by Peter Woit – a mathematician at Columbia University – and aimed at the ...

From growing up in a Kolkata shaped by legends like Satyendra Nath Bose to winning the $3 million Breakthrough Prize, physicist Ashoke Sen reflects on the ideas that transformed string theory. In this ...

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 ...

David Gross shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics and is the director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Gross is one of the leading ...

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.