Since the 1980s, string theory has emerged as the leading candidate for achieving every physicist’s dream: reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics and thereby finding a tidy explanation ...

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 ...

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 ...