Away from the safety of your home, the universe was not made for your convenience.

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

The hardest part of research is always to find a question that’s big enough that it’s worth answering, but little enough that you actually can answer it.

We have one real candidate for changing the rules; this is string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectory of a particle in spacetime is replaced by a two-dimensional orbit of a string. Such strings can be of any size, but under ordinary circumstances they are quite tiny, ... a value determined by comparing the predictions of the theory for Newton's constant and the fine structure constant to experimental values.