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 ...

Since the 1980s, string theory has emerged as the leading candidate for achieving every physicist’s dream: reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics and thereby finding a tidy explanation ...

INCE THE SIXTH century B.C., when Thales of Miletus posited that all of nature is made of water, physicists have tried to construct a single theoretical edifice encompassing every aspect of matter and ...

The Universe we know and love -- with Einstein's General Relativity as our theory of gravity and quantum field theories of the other three forces -- has a problem that we don't often talk about: it's ...

String theory, at least on paper, seems to have succeeded. Gravity not only fits in with quantum behavior — it is actually required by string theory. But here’s the problem: string theory is exciting ...

String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been made that have not been lived up to. Theoretical physicists have now for the first time used string theory to describe a physical ...

Three decades ago, a British documentary series named Connections aired, which showed viewers how various scientific achievements and discoveries were really interrelated, no matter how disparate they ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An artist’s rendition of a multibranched network of neurons. Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter from Scientific ...

Theorists from the Institute for Advanced Study have proposed a way forward in the quest to test string theory. Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being ...

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 ...