String theory is having trouble producing inflation – the rapid expansion of space thought to have occurred in the early universe – at least in some of the theory’s simplest incarnations, according to ...

We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful ...

String theory has long been touted as physicists' best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the universe, with elementary particles and forces described as vibrations of tiny threads of ...

String theory is the best candidate we have for a theory of everything. Bend to its rule and the various tangled theories of conventional physics emerge as part of a sublime, higher-dimensional ...