He found various indications that the perturbative string theories fit together into a coherent nonperturbative theory, which he dubbed M-theory. Then, in 1995, the physicist Edward Witten discovered the mother of all string theories. Theorists could calculate what happens when two graviton strings collide at high energies, but not when there’s a confluence of gravitons extreme enough to form a black hole. But the five known versions of string theory were all “perturbative,” meaning they broke down in some regimes. Interest in string theory soared in the mid-1980s, when physicists realized that it gave mathematically consistent descriptions of quantized gravity. The theory famously posits that gravitons, as well as electrons, photons and everything else, are not point-particles but rather imperceptibly tiny ribbons of energy, or “strings,” that vibrate in different ways.
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