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 ...

If the World Science Festival's panel on string theory tackled the question of whether the math behind it could be a reliable guide to reality, its panel on the Limits of Understanding seemed to ...

Bootstrapping strings Evidence that string theory could be the sole viable “theory of everything” has emerged in a new theoretical study of particle scattering. (Courtesy: iStock/Anadmist) Striking ...

Physicists looking for a way to test their theory about strings might make more progress if they tangle them up. String theory — equations that aspire to explain all of nature’s particles and forces — ...

You may not have heard of knot theory. But take it from Bill Menasco, a knot theorist of 35 years: This field of mathematics, rich in aesthetic beauty and intellectual challenges, has come a long way ...

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 ...

Mathematics Department Chair Shing-Tung Yau hopes to make analytic geometry and string theory accessible to a wider audience with his new book, “The Shape of Inner Space,” which he co-wrote with ...

For decades researchers have tried to wrest testable predictions from string theory, the leading candidate for a more fundamental understanding of the universe. Now physicists say they have used one ...

One of the subjects we keep coming back to here at Nobel Intent is the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics. One of the main contenders for this has to be string theory, in which all ...