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 ...

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 ...

String theory is having another bad week on the internet with feuds roiling on the social media platform X. François Chollet ...

Children frequently trouble their parents with questions such as: "What is space?" "What is the world made of?" "Can time travel backwards?" "How fast can the fastest thing go?" People who never grow ...

In light of the recent criticisms of string theory, preeminent physicist Juan Maldacena sheds light on the promise of string theory and how it fits into our current understanding of the universe. In ...

String theory, conceptualized more than 50 years ago as a framework to explain the formation of matter, remains elusive as a "provable" phenomenon. But a team of physicists has now taken a significant ...

String theory aims to explain all fundamental forces and particles in the universe—essentially, how the world operates on the smallest scales. Though it has not yet been experimentally verified, work ...

In 1998, astronomers discovered dark energy. The finding, which transformed our conception of the cosmos, came with a little-known consequence: It threw a wrench into the already daunting task of ...

Can adding every positive whole number really give you -1/12? We explore how physicists extract meaningful finite values from ...