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

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 ...

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 ...

Since the 1980s, string theory has emerged as the leading candidate for achieving every physicist’s dream: reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics and thereby finding a tidy explanation ...

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 ...

INCE THE SIXTH century B.C., when Thales of Miletus posited that all of nature is made of water, physicists have tried to construct a single theoretical edifice encompassing every aspect of matter and ...

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 ...

Theorists from the Institute for Advanced Study have proposed a way forward in the quest to test string theory. Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being ...

Experimental physicists study the strong force; string theorists try to calculate its effects. Together, they are finding common ground, where string theory can be applied to the physics of ...

Three decades ago, a British documentary series named Connections aired, which showed viewers how various scientific achievements and discoveries were really interrelated, no matter how disparate they ...

Your donation today will help MinnPost continue to report on the news you need. WASHINGTON — Reality comes in layers. Everything we see in the world around us, scientists tell us, is made of atoms and ...