Years ago, an audacious Fields medalist outlined a sweeping program that, he claimed, could be used to resolve a major problem in algebraic geometry. Other mathematicians had their doubts. Now he says ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Eight decades have passed since physicists realized that the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity don’t fit together, and the puzzle of how to combine the two remains unsolved. In the last few ...

Until recently, string theory — long heralded as a 'theory of everything' — hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything. But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical ...

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 ...