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 ...

Japanese physicists have created a string theory model that simulates the birth of the universe. In their model, the Big Bang was a "symmetry-breaking event" — a fluctuation that caused three spatial ...

String theory has so far failed to live up to its promise as a way to unite gravity and quantum mechanics. At the same time, it has blossomed into one of the most useful sets of tools in science.

Researchers are demonstrating that, in certain contexts, string theory is the only consistent theory of quantum gravity. Might this make it true? Thirty years have passed since a pair of physicists, ...