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 ...

John McGreevy is Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. He is a theoretical physicist with interests in quantum matter, string theory, and ...

String theory unifies all the forces of nature. Forces that seem very different, such as gravity and electricity, are deeply related to one another. The forces are linked by so-called dualities: the ...

He arrived onstage without a violin — neither his 1714 Soil Stradivarius nor his Guarneri del Gesu 1743 Sauret, which he has played on concert stages around the world — and still gave a command ...

Surviving Trump and overcoming climate change: American economist Jeffrey Sachs ponders on some of the greatest threats facing mankind. Perspectives from space: Magnus, who flew on STS-135, the final ...

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 ...

String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force ...

String theory is perhaps the most high-profile candidate for what physicists call a theory of everything – a single mathematical framework capable of describing the entirety of the known universe. The ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article ...

SMALL PRINT:MOST OF us curse knots – in our shoe laces, in long tresses, in our ties and in streams of traffic. But some people celebrate them, studying them with delight and disecting them with a ...