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 ...

80 years ago, Gödel demonstrated that formal systems that can perform math can't generate the certainty we'd like. That hasn't stopped math from helping us understand the natural world.

Higher spin gravity can be thought of as the "smaller cousin" of String Theory, "too simple to reproduce General Relativity, but very instructive as a playground for ideas," as Neiman puts it. In ...

After the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland in 2010, flight cancellations left Miranda Cheng stranded in Paris. While waiting for the ash to clear, Cheng, then a postdoctoral researcher at ...

Bootstrapping strings Evidence that string theory could be the sole viable “theory of everything” has emerged in a new theoretical study of particle scattering. (Courtesy: iStock/Anadmist) Striking ...

String theory, simultaneously one of the most promising and controversial ideas in modern physics, may be more capable of helping probe the inner workings of subatomic particles than was previously ...

Noted physicist, computer scientist, and mathematician Stephen Wolfram recently stunned the science community at-large after announcing he’d pretty much figured out how the universe works. It’s ...

QUANTA MAGAZINE: You do string theory on so-called K3 surfaces. What are they, and why are they important? MIRANDA CHENG: String theory says there are 10 space-time dimensions. Since we only perceive ...