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, ...

Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major ...

String theory, a mathematical construct aiming to unify physics, posits the existence of extra, curled-up dimensions. Public and media interest in string theory has waned in recent years, coinciding ...

String theory aims to explain all fundamental forces and particles in the universe—essentially, how the world operates on the smallest scales. Though it has not yet been experimentally verified, work ...

Stop. Look around. All things, visible or not, are made of particles so tiny that many find their sizes difficult to comprehend. Far removed from our everyday experiences, they move at rapid speeds ...

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 ...

String theory attempts to unify all forces and particles in the universe using vibrating strings. It aims to explain the Standard Model of particle physics, which is incomplete. String theory predicts ...

A central goal that modern physicists share is finding a single theory that can explain the entire universe and unite the forces of nature. The standard model, for example, leaves , , and even gravity ...

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 ...

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 ...

String theory used to get everyone all tied up in knots. Even its practitioners fretted about how complicated it was, while other physicists mocked its lack of experimental predictions. The rest of ...