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 ...

For the last 40 years, a dedicated group of theoretical physicists has been beavering away on an ambitious project to create a quantum theory of gravity and unify the four forces of nature. Using ...

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 ...

If you could take an apple and break it into smaller and smaller parts, you would find molecules, then atoms, followed by subatomic particles like protons and the quarks and gluons that make them up.

Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe ...

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 ...

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.

1. Name the German physicist who is widely credited with first studying the general theory of relativity in five dimensions, creating the precursors of some ideas that later appeared in string theory.