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 ...

While the novel theory may never live up to the early hype, its innovative tools have helped scientists for decades, and the best may be yet to come. String theory was once the hottest thing in ...

String theory is a hypothetical idea that purports to be a theory of everything, able to explain the fundamental microscopic aspects of all of reality, from the forces of nature to the building blocks ...

But despite its extraordinary popularity among some of the smartest people on the planet, string theory hasn’t been embraced by everyone–and now, nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash, some ...

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 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 ...

For the last 30 years of his life, Albert Einstein tried to come up with a Unified Field Theory, to combine the equations of Gravity and Electromagnetism. Unfortunately, he failed. In 1984, two Jewish ...

The problem with string theory, according to some physicists, is that it makes too many universes. It predicts not one but some 10 500 versions of spacetime, each with their own laws of physics. But ...

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 ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London.View full profile Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum ...