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 ...

Does string theory—the controversial “theory of everything” from physics—tell us anything about consciousness and the human ...

Recent theoretical advances continue to uncover profound interconnections between string theory and disparate areas of pure mathematics, notably modular forms, finite groups and vertex operator ...

Recent decades have witnessed remarkable progress in establishing rigorous mathematical frameworks for quantum field theory (QFT), conformal field theory (CFT), quantum gravity and string theory.

For more than a century, scientists have wondered why physical structures like blood vessels, neurons, tree branches, and ...

A decade ago astrophysicists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), operated by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ...

String theory has so far failed to live up to its promise as a way to unite gravity and quantum mechanics. At the same time, it has blossomed into one of the most useful sets of tools in science.

String theory is perhaps the most high-profile candidate for what physicists call a theory of everything – a single mathematical framework capable of describing the entirety of the known universe. The ...

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 ...

In October 1984 I arrived at Oxford University, trailing a large steamer trunk containing a couple of changes of clothing and about five dozen textbooks. I had a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in ...

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 ...