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 ...

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 ...

String theory, conceptualized more than 50 years ago as a framework to explain the formation of matter, remains elusive as a "provable" phenomenon. But a team of physicists has now taken a significant ...

In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called “Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?” Hawking, who later became my ...

String field theory is a second-quantised framework that recasts the perturbative dynamics of strings in terms of field-theoretic variables on the space of string configurations. By organising ...