In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called ...

At the turn of the century, it sounded as if string theory could give us big answers about the universe. Well… has it?

The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match. It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the ...

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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, ...

Children frequently trouble their parents with questions such as: "What is space?" "What is the world made of?" "Can time travel backwards?" "How fast can the fastest thing go?" People who never grow ...

Stanford math professor Keith Devlin talks about two new books that call into question the entire idea of string theory. The theory states that tiny vibrating strings make up everything, but some ...

Note: For a definition of unfamiliar terms, see our glossary. The fundamental particles of the universe that physicists have identified—electrons, neutrinos, quarks, and so on—are the "letters" of all ...

It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the very tough job of fitting gravity into the quantum laws of nature in such a way that, on large scales, gravity looks like curves in the ...

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 ...

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Rumor has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a ...

It is far worse than that. Most physicists working on string theory don't even care if what they are working on represents reality. What they care about is getting the next paper out the door and ...