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 ...

In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called "Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?" Forty-five years later, ...

Pick up any science fiction book from the 1960s, and you’ll find parallel dimensions explained through magic portals or mysterious machines that work “just because.” Today’s readers want stories that ...

String theory is a purported theory of everything that physicists hope will one day explain … everything. All the forces, all the particles, all the constants, all the things under a single ...

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 ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a ...

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 ...

Tiny little threads whizzing through spacetime and vibrating incessantly: this is roughly how you can imagine the universe, according to string theory. The various vibrations of the threads generate ...

String theory is a purported theory of everything that physicists hope will one day explain … everything. All the forces, all the particles, all the constants, all the things under a single ...

It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the very tough job of fitting gravity into the quantum laws of nature in such a way that, on large scales, gravity looks like curves in the ...

The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match. It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the ...