Imagine you are sitting in a big symphony hall, and you’re listening to an orchestra play for the first time. The orchestra is performing a Violin Concerto by Beethoven. As the soloist runs her hands ...

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 ...

String theory—the idea that particles are not point-like, but instead one-dimensional strings—is a popular theoretical framework that attempts to combine general relativity and quantum field theory ...

String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force ...

Scientists propose a link between string field theory and quantum mechanics that could open the door to using string field theory as the basis of all physics. Their calculations "could solve the ...

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 ...

The strings of string theory are unimaginably small. Your average string, if it exists, is about 10-33 centimeters long. That's a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter ...

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 ...