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 ...

Stop. Look around. All things, visible or not, are made of particles so tiny that many find their sizes difficult to comprehend. Far removed from our everyday experiences, they move at rapid speeds ...

Long touted as a theory of everything, it seems that string theory may at last succeed as a theory of something very specific — the interactions of particles under the strong nuclear force. You have ...

He worked long and hard many decades to try to find the theory and he never did. Since his passing many physicists haven take up where he left off, and many of us believe then an approach called ...

The physicist Subir Sachdev borrows tools from string theory to understand the puzzling behavior of superconductors. String theory was devised as a way to unite the laws of quantum mechanics with ...

Ever since antiquity, attempts have been made to reduce an apparently complex reality to a few elementary building blocks from which everything else is constructed. This project – now called ...

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 ...

After the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in Iceland in 2010, flight cancellations left Miranda Cheng stranded in Paris. While waiting for the ash to clear, Cheng, then a postdoctoral researcher at ...

"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 ...