The gauge bosons of the standard model of particle physics are responsible for three of the four known forces in the universe, conveyed through the exchange of virtual bosons. In electromagnetism, the ...

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?" Forty-five years later, ...

String field theory is a second-quantised framework that recasts the perturbative dynamics of strings in terms of field-theoretic variables on the space of string configurations. By organising ...

Physicists claim they may have found a long-awaited explanation for dark energy, the mysterious force that's driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, a new preprint study hints. Their ...

String theory seeks to describe fundamental interactions by modelling particles as one-dimensional strings. In efforts to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, it introduces additional ...

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 ...

Large masses – such as a galaxy – curve space-time. Objects move along a geodesic. If we take into account that space-time itself has quantum properties, deviations arise (dashed line vs. solid line).