In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was 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 ...

At the turn of the century, it sounded as if string theory could give us big answers about the universe. Well… has it?

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 ...

Moduli spaces form the mathematical framework for categorising the diverse solutions characteristic of string theory, providing a systematic means to parameterise the various vacuum configurations ...

In physics, there are two great pillars of thought that don't quite fit together. The Standard Model of particle physics describes all known fundamental particles and three forces: electromagnetism, ...

Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another ...

Stanford math professor Keith Devlin talks about two new books that call into question the entire idea of string theory. The theory states that tiny vibrating strings make up everything, but some ...

Einstein introduced the cosmological constant to his equations of general relativity because he believed the universe was static. Faced with evidence that the universe was actually expanding, however, ...