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 ...

Tenets of quantum mechanics and special relativity, among other theoretical ideas, lead inexorably to string theory.

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.

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 ...

(via Sabine Hossenfelder) Over the past decade, string theorists have struggled to reconcile their elegant mathematical theory with the reality of our observable reality, inventing what has been ...

A new study just added an interesting twist to the complicated history of the physics theory.

A new theoretical study suggests that the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the universe—known as dark energy—may actually be rooted in a deeply quantum structure of space-time.

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 ...