Ever since antiquity, attempts have been made to reduce an apparently complex reality to a few elementary building blocks from which everything else is constructed. This project – now called ...

Today's physicists are struggling with a quandary. They have accepted two separate theories that explain how the universe works: Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes the ...

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 ...

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). String theory was devised as a way to unite the laws of quantum mechanics with those of gravity, with the goal of creating the vaunted “theory of ...

String theory has been the darling of the theoretical physics community for decades. It has reigned as the dominant theory in prestigious US research institutions since the 1980s. Elegant books, TV ...

String theory, simultaneously one of the most promising and controversial ideas in modern physics, may be more capable of helping probe the inner workings of subatomic particles than was previously ...

Was the big bang really the beginning of time? or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only decades ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no ...

The physicist Subir Sachdev borrows tools from string theory to understand the puzzling behavior of superconductors. String theory was devised as a way to unite the laws of quantum mechanics with ...