String theory strutted onto the scene some 30 years ago as perfection itself, a promise of elegant simplicity that would solve knotty problems in fundamental physics—including the notoriously ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. which is then tested further, and either validated, in which case new ...

String theory might be the theory of everything… or a flawed framework for theoretical physics. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

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 ...

For decades, scientists have theorized about what lies beyond the third dimension and if there can exist a unified theory to explain all of the workings of the universe. This insurmountable task has ...

The idea of String Theory is that our Universe came from a higher-dimensional, more symmetric, more complex state with an enormous number of degrees of freedom. In order for String Theory to be solved ...

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 has so far failed to live up to its promise as a way to unite gravity and quantum mechanics. At the same time, it has blossomed into one of the most useful sets of tools in science.

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 ...