than the last = ?

Context:

The problem is that physics appears to be leading us not to resolution but into an Alice in Wonderland world of increasingly bizarre theories, each farther removed than the last from our experience of the everyday world. In recent years cosmologists have posited that our universe is just one among an untold number of universes that bubble up constantly from quantum foam. Theoretical physicists have looked to the exotic mathematics of string theory, which suggests the existence of seven extra dimensions beyond the four we already know about. Experimentalists have built the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider in part to understand why we can observe only a portion of what our theories of matter predict.