String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force ...

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 ...

Could reality be made of more dimensions than those we perceive? The question has consumed some of the most brilliant physics minds for over a century, from unifying space and time into spacetime by ...

Most people are perfectly content with three dimensions to carry out daily tasks -- or four if they take time into account. String theorists, on the other hand, think that many more dimensions are ...

For more than a century, physicists have suspected that the familiar three dimensions of space and one of time might be only a sliver of reality. Extra dimensions, if they exist, would not just be a ...

Heterotic string theory remains a captivating framework in the pursuit of unifying quantum mechanics with gravity. By merging aspects of bosonic and supersymmetric strings, it provides a fertile ...

Today's physicists are struggling with a quandary. They have accepted two separate theories that explain how the universe works: Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes the ...

String theory proposes that the fundamental constituents of the universe are one-dimensional “strings” rather than point-like particles. What we perceive as particles are actually vibrations in loops ...

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 ...

NOVA: What is so compelling about string theory to make you want to devote your career to it? Lykken: I think when a lot of people go into theoretical physics, they're looking for the big answers to ...

It's one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in all of physics: string theory. At the heart of string theory is the thread of an idea that's run through physics for centuries, that ...