Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major ...

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 ...

What if our 3D reality is a projection from a 2D surface? Part 2 dives deeper into string theory's claim of 10 hidden ...

String theory strutted onto the scene some 30 years ago as perfection itself, a promise of elegant simplicity that would solve knotty problems in fundamental physics—including the notoriously ...

String theory has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments -- but in a completely unexpected realm of physics. The theory has long been touted as the best hope for a unified ...

String theory is an attempt to unite the two pillars of 20th century physics — quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity — with an overarching framework that can explain all of ...

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 ...

A research team led by Maxim Kontsevich, a professor at the French Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) and a 1998 ...

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 ...