Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and director of Columbia’s Center for Theoretical Physics, is the author of “The Elegant Universe” and “Until the End of ...

AS THE bell rings for the final round, both fighters are in their corners. The heavyweight champion is panting, against the ropes. The underdog is sprawled on the opposite side, bruised, tired but ...

The apparent inability of physics' string theory to be proved right or wrong is one of the stickiest – and argument-generating – problems in modern science. But now researchers at the University of ...

The magnum opus of particle physics is far from complete, requiring physicists to devise many alternatives—some weirder than ...

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 ...

If you could take an apple and break it into smaller and smaller parts, you would find molecules, then atoms, followed by subatomic particles like protons and the quarks and gluons that make them up.

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a ...

Abstract, mathematically complex and (so far) unsupported by direct experimental evidence, string theory attracts plenty of criticism. Yet it remains an incredibly active area of research, with ...

“Not even wrong” was Wolfgang Pauli’s ultimate put-down for any theory he considered wide of the mark. Here it is adopted by Peter Woit – a mathematician at Columbia University – and aimed at the ...