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 ...

New Scientist tackles eight of the deepest challenges faced by science – from reality and consciousness, to free will and death, in The Big Questions special features. It’s all-out war. The ...

On a more serious note, the title of the article says "Requiem". I was expecting it to pronounce String Theory dead, but the conclusion seems a little bit ambiguous. Are people still working at it ...

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 ...

In 1998, astronomers discovered dark energy. The finding, which transformed our conception of the cosmos, came with a little-known consequence: It threw a wrench into the already daunting task of ...

Many physicists consider string theory our best hope for combining quantum physics and gravity into a unified theory of everything. Yet a contrary opinion is that the concept is practically ...

Finding a theory of everything – explaining all the forces and particles in the universe – is arguably the holy grail of physics. While each of its main theories works extraordinarily well, they clash ...