Albert Einstein famously devoted the later part of his life to seeking a theory that would offer, at least in principle, a comprehensive description of the laws of nature. This ‘unified field theory’, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Until recently, string theory — long heralded as a 'theory of everything' — hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything. But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical ...

After the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland in 2010, flight cancellations left Miranda Cheng stranded in Paris. While waiting for the ash to clear, Cheng, then a postdoctoral researcher at ...

String theory used to get everyone all tied up in knots. Even its practitioners fretted about how complicated it was, while other physicists mocked its lack of experimental predictions. The rest of ...

String theory might be the theory of everything… or a flawed framework for theoretical physics. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

String theory—the idea that particles are not point-like, but instead one-dimensional strings—is a popular theoretical framework that attempts to combine general relativity and quantum field theory ...