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 ...

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 ...

String theory, at least on paper, seems to have succeeded. Gravity not only fits in with quantum behavior — it is actually required by string theory. But here’s the problem: string theory is exciting ...

NOVA: Is it possible to describe string theory in a nutshell? Peet: The central idea of string theory is actually remarkably simple. The details are, of course, complicated, but the fundamental idea ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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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 ...