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 ...

Three decades ago, a British documentary series named Connections aired, which showed viewers how various scientific achievements and discoveries were really interrelated, no matter how disparate they ...

String theory has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments -- but in a completely unexpected realm of physics. The theory has long been touted as the best hope for a unified ...

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 ...

But even without experimental evidence, string theory has proven to be a wellspring of new mathematical ideas. Junior Fellow Elise LePage of the Simons Society of Fellows is one of the mathematicians ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.