NOVA: String theory's great claim to fame is that it unifies the four forces. Why is unification so important? Weinberg: Unification is where it's at. The whole aim of fundamental physics is to see ...

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?" Forty-five years later, ...

The accepted theory that the universe began evolving some 13.7 billion years ago from an infinitely dense and hot substance that has been expanding since the first extremely small fraction of a second ...

Our universe may be fundamentally unstable. In a flash, the vacuum of space-time may find a new ground state, triggering a cataclysmic transformation of the physics of the universe. Or not. A new ...

String theory has long been presented as physicists' best candidate for describing the fundamental nature of the Universe. Yet, at the beginning of the 21st century, it became apparent that most ...

String theory attempts to unify all forces and particles in the universe using vibrating strings. It aims to explain the Standard Model of particle physics, which is incomplete. String theory predicts ...

pt. 1. edge of knowledge -- ch. 1. Tied up with string -- pt. 2. Dilemma of space, time, and the quanta -- ch. 2. Space, time, and the eye of the beholder -- ch. 3. Of warps and ripples -- ch. 4.

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 ...

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 ...

Introduces string theory and shows how modern physics—composed of two theories that are ferociously incompatible—reached its schizophrenic impasse: One theory, general relativity, successfully ...