Stanford math professor Keith Devlin talks about two new books that call into question the entire idea of string theory. The theory states that tiny vibrating strings make up everything, but some ...

At the turn of the century, it sounded as if string theory could give us big answers about the universe. Well… has it?

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 ...

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 ...

If the World Science Festival's panel on string theory tackled the question of whether the math behind it could be a reliable guide to reality, its panel on the Limits of Understanding seemed to ...

String theory, simultaneously one of the most promising and controversial ideas in modern physics, may be more capable of helping probe the inner workings of subatomic particles than was previously ...

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, ...

After the star-studded mystery thriller The Number 23 debuted in cinemas in 2007, many people became convinced that they were seeing the eponymous number everywhere. I was in school at that time, and ...

An illustration of two black holes about to merge and emitting copious gravitational waves. And as the numbers of gravitational-wave observations have increased, physicists’ careful modeling is ...

Ask any credentialed nerd what the ultimate theory of physics is, and chances are they'll reply, "string theory." In string theory — an idea that's been around since the late 1970s — the universe is a ...