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 ...

Heterotic string models arise by compactifying ten-dimensional string theories that combine supersymmetric strings with large gauge groups on six-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifolds. The choice of Calabi ...

The Nature Index 2025 Research Leaders — previously known as Annual Tables — reveal the leading institutions and countries/territories in the natural and health sciences, according to their output in ...

Mathematics Department Chair Shing-Tung Yau hopes to make analytic geometry and string theory accessible to a wider audience with his new book, “The Shape of Inner Space,” which he co-wrote with ...

While the novel theory may never live up to the early hype, its innovative tools have helped scientists for decades, and the best may be yet to come. String theory was once the hottest thing in ...

Japanese physicists have created a string theory model that simulates the birth of the universe. In their model, the Big Bang was a "symmetry-breaking event" — a fluctuation that caused three spatial ...

British physicist Stephen Hawking may claim that extra dimensions provide the key to understanding the "grand design" of the universe, but it's Chinese-American mathematician Shing-Tung Yau who ...

Einstein introduced the cosmological constant to his equations of general relativity because he believed the universe was static. Faced with evidence that the universe was actually expanding, however, ...

String theory strutted onto the scene some 30 years ago as perfection itself, a promise of elegant simplicity that would solve knotty problems in fundamental physics—including the notoriously ...