String theory's equations give rise to a near infinite variety of potential universes in a 'landscape.' This landscape is surrounded by a 'swampland' of solutions that are incompatible with any ...

In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called “Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?” Hawking, who later became my ...

But despite its extraordinary popularity among some of the smartest people on the planet, string theory hasn’t been embraced by everyone–and now, nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash, some ...

of its present age and the presence of the galaxy string defies existing models, which can not explain how a string this big could have formed so long ago. This is the first time astronomers have been ...

A new paper discusses how light interacts with theoretical objects called "topological solitons" — kinks in the fabric of space-time that look just like black holes. When you purchase through links on ...

In the moments before the Big Bang, our universe was a hot, dense, and extremely high-energy place. That all changed when the universe exploded 13.8 billion years ago. Rapid inflation divided a single ...

String theory proposes that the fundamental constituents of the universe are one-dimensional “strings” rather than point-like particles. What we perceive as particles are actually vibrations in loops ...