String theory pioneer Edward Witten has won the 2010 Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics for “his many profound contributions that have transformed areas of particle theory, quantum field ...

Albert Einstein labored unsuccessfully for decades to create a theory that would merge relativity and quantum physics into one tidy mathematical package. But where Einstein failed, physicists may ...

For decades, scientists have theorized about what lies beyond the third dimension and if there can exist a unified theory to explain all of the workings of the universe. This insurmountable task has ...

The theoretical physicist Edward Witten, mathematician Maxim Kontsevich and astrophysicist Rashid Alievich Sunyaev have been awarded the 2008 Crafoord Prize. Witten and Kontsevich share one half of ...

One of the strangest ideas about the nature of the universe could be one of the most important. Do long, thin, and incredibly dense strands of matter called cosmic strings wind their way throughout ...

Theorists from the Institute for Advanced Study have proposed a way forward in the quest to test string theory. Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being ...

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.

During a visit this fall, I spotted Witten on the Institute’s central lawn and requested an interview; in his quick, alto voice, he said he couldn’t promise to be able to answer my questions but would ...

Like members of a family, the four basic forces of nature are all distinct personalities, with their separate quirks, abilities and housekeeping chores. Electromagnetism makes it possible for ...

It’s not easy being a “theory of everything.” A TOE has the very tough job of fitting gravity into the quantum laws of nature in such a way that, on large scales, gravity looks like curves in the ...

Imagine a world unified by a single scientific principle, something that can explain life’s greatest mysteries, from the origin of space and time to gravity and smaller matters, like daydreams. Now ...