"From one of our foremost thinkers and public intellectuals, a radical new view of the nature of time and the cosmos What is time? This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and cosmologists face--from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles of quantum physics to the unification of forces...

A theoretical physicist describes the evolution of modern-day string theory, the flaws in the attempt to formulate a "theory of everything" to explain all the forces and particles of nature and the origins of the universe, and their repercussions for physics.