Small vibrations: Richard Norte in his lab at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of Delft University of Technology. (Courtesy: Studio Wavy for Delft University of Technology) A new “nanostring” has ...

Some physicists think there is a unit of matter more fundamental than what has been experimentally confirmed to date. They think that everything in the universe is made of tiny vibrating strands of ...

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?” Hawking, who later became my ...

String theory has long been presented as physicists' best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the Universe. Yet, at the beginning of the 21st century, it became apparent that most ...

The idea of string theory was first floated in the 1960s and '70s. Scientists may have found the first observational evidence that supports string theory -- a hypothetical framework in physics ...

String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force ...