The magnum opus of particle physics is far from complete, requiring physicists to devise many alternatives—some weirder than ...

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.

The gauge bosons of the standard model of particle physics are responsible for three of the four known forces in the universe, conveyed through the exchange of virtual bosons. In electromagnetism, the ...

Physicists claim they may have found a long-awaited explanation for dark energy, the mysterious force that's driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, a new preprint study hints. Their ...

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 ...

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.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Scientists seeking the secrets of the universe would like to make a model that shows how all of nature’s forces and particles fit ...

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 ...

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 ...