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

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It's one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in all of physics: string theory. At the heart of string theory is the thread of an idea that's run through physics for centuries, that ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Even if you're not super into TikTok trends, you should still pay attention to the invisible string ...

What is the stuff in the universe made of? Our high-school physics tells us atoms, with 90 natural elements building the world around us. But what are these atoms made of? Over the last century, we've ...

String theory has so far failed to live up to its promise as a way to unite gravity and quantum mechanics. At the same time, it has blossomed into one of the most useful sets of tools in science.