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

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 ...

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 ...

Quantum field theory (QFT) remains the cornerstone of our understanding of particle interactions, unifying the principles of quantum mechanics with special relativity by describing particles as ...

Scientists seeking the secrets of the universe would like to make a model that shows how all of nature’s forces and particles fit together. It would be nice to do it with Legos. But perhaps a better ...

Heterotic string theory remains a captivating framework in the pursuit of unifying quantum mechanics with gravity. By merging aspects of bosonic and supersymmetric strings, it provides a fertile ...

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 ...

Theoretical physicist Lennaert Huiszoon has described a new family of strings in research conducted at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics. He investigated so-called ...

Physicists who have been roaming the “landscape” of string theory—the space of zillions and zillions of mathematical solutions of the theory, where each solution provides the kinds of equations ...

String theory has long been touted as physicists' best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the universe, with elementary particles and forces described as vibrations of tiny threads of ...