In this 2011 image, a NASA engineer looks on as the first six of the James Webb Space Telescope's 18 mirror segments are prepped to begin their final cryogenic testing. Engineers spent three decades ...

M-Theory stands as a promising candidate for a unified framework, encapsulating the various superstring theories and positing an 11-dimensional description of nature. Its compactification on ...

In the quest to unravel the mysteries of the universe, physicists are revisiting a 150-year-old theory that could illuminate why matter prevails over antimatter. This knot hypothesis, originally ...

“This retroactive idea. It has to be that,” says Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, reflecting on a problem about the building blocks of reality that has dogged physics for ...

Constructor Theory is the ability to see the deepest underlying facts about the world. The people behind the greatest leaps in physics - Einstein, Newton, Heisenberg, all had the uncanny ability to ...

A new physics paper takes a step toward creating a long-sought "theory of everything" by uniting gravity with the quantum world. However, the new theory remains far from being proven observationally.

Quantum mechanics is both the most powerful theory physicists have ever devised and the most baffling. On the one hand, countless experiments have confirmed its predictions; the theory undergirds ...

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.