For more than a century, physicists have suspected that the familiar three dimensions of space and one of time might be only a sliver of reality. Extra dimensions, if they exist, would not just be a ...

String theory is a purported theory of everything that physicists hope will one day explain … everything. All the forces, all the particles, all the constants, all the things under a single ...

String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force ...

Physicists are scrambling to understand why dark energy is weakening. In a surprising twist, we must now reconsider the ...

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 ...

Most people are perfectly content with three dimensions to carry out daily tasks -- or four if they take time into account. String theorists, on the other hand, think that many more dimensions are ...

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 ...

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, ...

NOVA: What is so compelling about string theory to make you want to devote your career to it? Lykken: I think when a lot of people go into theoretical physics, they're looking for the big answers to ...

Heterotic string theory remains a captivating framework in the pursuit of unifying quantum mechanics with gravity. By merging aspects of bosonic and supersymmetric strings, it provides a fertile ...

In 1919, physicist Theodor Kaluza hypothesized that extra dimensions might solve some outstanding problems in physics. And while we haven't found any evidence yet for anything outside our normal ...