String theory might help us understand how mystery materials like high-temperature superconductors work (Illustration: Samuele Bastianello’)

STRING theory: you love it or loathe it. To some it represents our best hope for a route to a “theory of everything”; others portray it as anything from a mathematically obtuse minefield to a quasi-religion that has precious little to do with science.

There might be a middle way. String theory’s mathematical tools were designed to unlock the most profound secrets of the cosmos, but they could have a far less esoteric purpose: to tease out the properties of some of the most complex yet useful types of material here on Earth.

Both string theorists and condensed matter physicists – those studying the properties of complex matter phases such as solids and liquids – are enthused by the development. “I am flabbergasted,” says Jan Zaanen, a condensed matter theorist from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “The theory is calculating precisely what we are seeing in experiments.”

If solid science does turn out to be the salvation of string theory, it would be the latest twist in a tangled history. String theory was formulated in the late 1960s to explain certain features of the strong nuclear force, one of four fundamental forces of nature. It holds that electrons, quarks and the like are not point-like particles but minuscule, curled-up, vibrating strings. No sooner had this idea emerged, though, than it lost ground to particle physicists’ “standard model”, which proved capable of describing not just the strong force but also the weak and electromagnetic forces – and did so far more intuitively through the interactions …