The apparent inability of physics' string theory to be proved right or wrong is one of the stickiest – and argument-generating – problems in modern science. But now researchers at the University of ...

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.

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.

Abstract, mathematically complex and (so far) unsupported by direct experimental evidence, string theory attracts plenty of criticism. Yet it remains an incredibly active area of research, with ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...