Columnist Natalie Wolchover examines the latest developments in the “forever war” over whether string theory can describe the ...

The idea of String Theory is that our Universe came from a higher-dimensional, more symmetric, more complex state with an enormous number of degrees of freedom. In order for String Theory to be solved ...

Eight decades have passed since physicists realized that the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity don’t fit together, and the puzzle of how to combine the two remains unsolved. In the last few ...

For decades, scientists have theorized about what lies beyond the third dimension and if there can exist a unified theory to explain all of the workings of the universe. This insurmountable task has ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a ...

For decades, physicists have been trying to combine quantum physics and general relativity into a single, unified theory. One of the leading contenders is string theory, an elegant vision in which ...

(Phys.org)—Look hard enough, string theory says, and at a scale so small that atoms loom as large as entire continents do to us you would see that every particle in the universe is just the product of ...

Physicists looking for a way to test their theory about strings might make more progress if they tangle them up. String theory — equations that aspire to explain all of nature’s particles and forces — ...

Imagine you are sitting in a big symphony hall, and you’re listening to an orchestra play for the first time. The orchestra is performing a Violin Concerto by Beethoven. As the soloist runs her hands ...