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, ...

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.

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 ...

The odds of the bet Jonathan Oppenheim made in 2023 are generous, even at 5000 to 1. But if he wins, it could transform our view of the universe. The physicist is wagering that space-time, and ...

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).

Canonical gravity reformulates general relativity in Hamiltonian form, identifying canonical coordinates and conjugate momenta that obey first‐class constraints enforcing diffeomorphism invariance.

A proposed experiment could shed light on the unknown interplay of quantum theory and general relativity. Quantum theory in curved spacetime can be theoretically understood beyond the limit at which ...

Researchers suggest that unambiguous signals of quantum gravity could appear in future tabletop experiments with gravitationally interacting objects. Is gravity quantum or classical? This fundamental ...