Scientists seeking the secrets of the universe would like to make a model that shows how all of nature's forces and particles fit together. It would be nice to do it with Legos. But perhaps a better ...

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 ...

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 ...

"When I was growing up, there were local heroes like Satyendra Nath Bose and Meghnad Saha who everyone in Kolkata knew," Professor Ashoke Sen recalls. Today, the 69-year-old is one of India's most ...

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 ...

Ever since antiquity, attempts have been made to reduce an apparently complex reality to a few elementary building blocks from which everything else is constructed. This project – now called ...

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 ...

The exotic theory of everything could shed light on the behaviour of real materials, thanks to an unexpected mathematical connection with condensed-matter physics. "On one side," says Jan Zaanen, "you ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. String theory is perhaps the most controversial big idea in all of ...

String theory may provide the best clues yet about how to obtain a unified theory that describes all the laws of nature, but do we even understand what string theory is? Download PDF Albert Einstein ...