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 ...

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 ...

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 began over 50 years ago as a way to understand the strong nuclear force. Since then, it’s grown to become a theory of everything, capable of explaining the nature of every particle, ...

String theory, which some physicists hope may be able to unify gravity and quantum mechanics, may have found a real-world application. A type of black hole predicted by string theory may help to ...

String theory is perhaps the most high-profile candidate for what physicists call a theory of everything – a single mathematical framework capable of describing the entirety of the known universe. The ...

Einstein desperately wanted a unified theory of physics. Thanks to gravitational waves—the poster child of general relativity—his wish might just come true. Gravitational waves are ripples in the ...

Bootstrapping strings Evidence that string theory could be the sole viable “theory of everything” has emerged in a new theoretical study of particle scattering. (Courtesy: iStock/Anadmist) Striking ...

For decades, physicists have been trying to combine quantum physics and general relativity into a single, unified theory. One of the leading contenders is string theory, an elegant vision in which ...

Physicists claim they may have found a long-awaited explanation for dark energy, the mysterious force that's driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, a new preprint study hints. Their ...