Ever since antiquity, attempts have been made to reduce an apparently complex reality to a few elementary building blocks from which everything else is constructed. This project – now called ...

Stop. Look around. All things, visible or not, are made of particles so tiny that many find their sizes difficult to comprehend. Far removed from our everyday experiences, they move at rapid speeds ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. String theory is perhaps the most controversial big idea in all of ...

Much to the delight of the mainstream media, there's a battle royal going on in physics. Over recent months, a fair bit of mud has been slung in the theoretical physics community over the issue of ...

The physicist Subir Sachdev borrows tools from string theory to understand the puzzling behavior of superconductors. String theory was devised as a way to unite the laws of quantum mechanics with ...

Was the big bang really the beginning of time? or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only decades ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no ...

New findings suggest that beneath the surface of quantum theory lies a vibrant string theory world where some matter corresponds to black holes in higher dimensions. According to modern quantum theory ...