“The thing about our universe,” says David Lyth, a professor at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, “is that it is not completely uniform. This has been a bit of a puzzle to cosmologists.” He ...

What’s more, branes don’t require the full range of mathematical tools required for string theory, opening the door to new groups of scientists. “You can use methods that are part and parcel of more ...

Strings & branes is a research area within theoretical high-energy physics and quantum gravity that studies extended fundamental objects—one-dimensional strings and higher-dimensional branes—in ...

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A philandering string theorist is caught with another woman by his wife. “But darling,” he pleads, “I can explain everything!” I didn’t invent the joke; it appeared in the satirical magazine The Onion ...

Researchers are demonstrating that, in certain contexts, string theory is the only consistent theory of quantum gravity. Might this make it true? Thirty years have passed since a pair of physicists, ...

Some questions are disquieting because they can be answered in only one of two equally mind-boggling ways. For instance, are we the sole intelligent beings in the universe, or will we find others?