[In its pursuit of the biggest, most tantalising question of all - whether there's a grand, all-embracing theory, a unified theory of everything, that will complete our understanding of the laws of the universe - the IAS has become a hotbed of string theorists, who argue that the basic building blocks of nature are not zero-dimensional particles as previously believed but tiny one-dimensional filaments called strings.] String theory is the best candidate to give us a unified understanding of the forces of nature, ... I began working on it in the early Seventies. It never occurred to me then that I'd still be working on it 30 years later.
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