Imagine you are sitting in a big symphony hall, and you’re listening to an orchestra play for the first time. The orchestra is performing a Violin Concerto by Beethoven. As the soloist runs her hands ...

String theory—the idea that particles are not point-like, but instead one-dimensional strings—is a popular theoretical framework that attempts to combine general relativity and quantum field theory ...

Biological systems are notoriously tough to model, especially when it comes to figuring out the axons, neurons, blood vessels, and other structural components of gray matter, or the tissue that makes ...

We’ve all been there; you might’ve met a person you were attracted to and felt a deep connection with, but passed them by and didn’t think anything of it until years later when they magically ...

"On one side," says Jan Zaanen, "you have this refined, almost other-worldly intellectual — the perfectionist obsessed with detail, barely interested in earthly pleasures. On the other, you have the ...

String theory used to get everyone all tied up in knots. Even its practitioners fretted about how complicated it was, while other physicists mocked its lack of experimental predictions. The rest of ...

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 ...

Experimental physicists study the strong force; string theorists try to calculate its effects. Together, they are finding common ground, where string theory can be applied to the physics of ...

Few prime-time TV shows would be willing to take on the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics and general relativity, string theory and 11-dimensional physics. But that’s just what “Nova” and physicist ...

String theory, which some physicists hope may be able to unify gravity and quantum mechanics, may have found a real-world application. A type of black hole predicted by string theory may help to ...