What makes Dr Burgess's proposal unusual is that he went out on a limb and suggested that these energy-sapping, curled-up extra dimensions should be as big as a few microns across, gargantuan by string-theory standards.

ECONOMIST: Cosmology

One of the best explanations of why the universe is the way it is so-called string theory requires that the universe be, in fact, ten-dimensional.

ECONOMIST: A matter of gravity

The strings predicted by string theory are so small and convoluted that unwrapping them would require energies that have not existed since shortly after the Big Bang. (This is the main reason why string theory remains just a theory.) Dr Arkani-Hamed's loops, however, may be observable with existing equipment.

ECONOMIST: A matter of gravity

In particle physics, sound-bite explanations are much harder: wave-particle duality, quantum mechanics, general relativity and string theory make good mathematical sense, or so I am told, but they generally defy translation into English.

WSJ: Matt Ridley on the Higgs Boson | Mind & Matter