Shamit Kachru, Renata Kallosh and Andrei Linde of Stanford, and Sandip Trivedi of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, India, find strong evidence that the “landscape of string theory” (the multidimensional “landscape” created by the possible values assumed by the equations of string theory) has at least one minimum (and therefore stable) where the laws of our universe are defined (which particles and forces exist, with what masses and what interactions); it will then be found that there are about 500 of these minima.
