String theory, conceptualized more than 50 years ago as a framework to explain the formation of matter, remains elusive as a "provable" phenomenon. But a team of physicists has now taken a significant ...

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 ...

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Modern physics theories highlight the key role of horizons—boundaries beyond which information cannot reach an observer—in a variety of cosmological and gravitational phenomena. Two renowned examples ...

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.

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.

String theory began over 50 years ago as a way to understand the strong nuclear force. Since then, it’s grown to become a theory of everything, capable of explaining the nature of every particle, ...

A decade ago astrophysicists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), operated by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ...

Steve Giddings is a University of California, Santa Barbara string theorist. A provocative branch of physics called string theory might explain everything in the universe, such as how matter came into ...