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 ...

Since the 1980s, string theory has emerged as the leading candidate for achieving every physicist’s dream: reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics and thereby finding a tidy explanation ...

INCE THE SIXTH century B.C., when Thales of Miletus posited that all of nature is made of water, physicists have tried to construct a single theoretical edifice encompassing every aspect of matter and ...

The idea of String Theory is that our Universe came from a higher-dimensional, more symmetric, more complex state with an enormous number of degrees of freedom. In order for String Theory to be solved ...

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, at least on paper, seems to have succeeded. Gravity not only fits in with quantum behavior — it is actually required by string theory. But here’s the problem: string theory is exciting ...

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 ...

But despite its extraordinary popularity among some of the smartest people on the planet, string theory hasn’t been embraced by everyone–and now, nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash, some ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An artist’s rendition of a multibranched network of neurons. Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter from Scientific ...