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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

String theory has long been presented as physicists' best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the Universe. Yet, at the beginning of the 21st century, it became apparent that most ...

In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally incompatible ...

Taylor Swift was on to something with her 2020 Folklore track “Invisible String.” The idea that individuals are intrinsically linked to each other has gained traction over the last few years, but the ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: String theory—the idea that particles are not point-like, but instead one-dimensional strings—is a popular theoretical framework that attempts to ...