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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Adam Ginsburg (University of Florida), Nazar Budaiev (University of Florida), Taehwa Yoo (University of Florida); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI) In 1980, Stephen ...

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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 is an attempt to unite the two pillars of 20th century physics — quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity — with an overarching framework that can explain all of ...

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 ...