"The Ultimate Building Blocks... Vibrating Strings"
Modern physics has a major conflict: General Relativity (gravity, macro) and Quantum Mechanics (particles, micro) do not work together mathematically. String Theory attempts to unify them into a single "Theory of Everything."
It proposes that fundamental particles like electrons are not point-like dots, but tiny, one-dimensional vibrating strings. Just as a violin string produces different notes depending on how it vibrates, these cosmic strings produce different particles based on their vibration patterns.
For the math to work, String Theory requires 10 or 11 dimensions. We only see 4 (3 space + 1 time) because the extra dimensions are curled up (compactified) so tightly at the microscopic level that they remain invisible to us.
Edward Witten unified five different string theories into M-Theory. It suggests our universe might be a membrane (brane) floating in a higher-dimensional space, potentially one of many universes in a vast Multiverse.