Tenets of quantum mechanics and special relativity, among other theoretical ideas, lead inexorably to string theory.

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 ...

Physicists may have uncovered a surprising new clue that string theory—the idea that the universe is built from unimaginably tiny vibrating strings—could be more than just a mathematical fantasy.

If you could take an apple and break it into smaller and smaller parts, you would find molecules, then atoms, followed by ...

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.

(via Sabine Hossenfelder) Over the past decade, string theorists have struggled to reconcile their elegant mathematical theory with the reality of our observable reality, inventing what has been ...

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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 ...