For more than a century, scientists have wondered why physical structures like blood vessels, neurons, tree branches, and ...

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 has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments -- but in a completely unexpected realm of physics. The theory has long been touted as the best hope for a unified ...

In this video, we explore the relationship between string theory and quantum field theory (QFT). QFT is a mathematical ...

In October 1984 I arrived at Oxford University, trailing a large steamer trunk containing a couple of changes of clothing and about five dozen textbooks. I had a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

After the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland in 2010, flight cancellations left Miranda Cheng stranded in Paris. While waiting for the ash to clear, Cheng, then a postdoctoral researcher at ...

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 ...