{"id":434876,"date":"2026-01-26T19:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T19:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/434876\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T19:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T19:24:10","slug":"is-particle-physics-dead-dying-or-just-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/434876\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This brain drain appears to be real. I spoke to Jared Kaplan, co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude. He was a physicist the last time we spoke. As a grad student at Harvard in the 2000s, he worked with the renowned theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed to open up the new directions in amplitude research that are being actively pursued today. But Kaplan left the field in 2019. \u201cI started working on AI because it seemed plausible to me that \u2026 AI was going to make progress faster than almost any field in science historically,\u201d he said. AI would be \u201cthe most important thing to happen while we\u2019re alive, maybe one of the most important things to happen in the history of science. And so it seemed obvious that I should work on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the future of particle physics, AI makes worrying about it now rather pointless, in Kaplan\u2019s view. \u201cI think that it\u2019s kind of irrelevant what we plan on a 10-year timescale, because if we\u2019re building a collider in 10 years, AI will be building the collider; humans won\u2019t be building it. I would give like a 50% chance that in two or three years, theoretical physicists will mostly be replaced with AI. Brilliant people like Nima Arkani-Hamed or Ed Witten, AI will be generating papers that are as good as their papers pretty autonomously. \u2026 So planning beyond this couple-year timescale isn\u2019t really something I think about very much.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Cari Cesarotti, a postdoctoral fellow in the theory group at CERN, is skeptical about that future. She notices chatbots\u2019 mistakes, and how they\u2019ve become too much of a crutch for physics students. \u201cAI is making people worse at physics,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat we need is humans to read textbooks and sit down and think of new solutions to the hierarchy problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\" <\/p>\n

Cesarotti was a high school junior when the Higgs boson was discovered. She grew up near Fermilab, the U.S. national lab in Illinois that houses the Tevatron, which was the world\u2019s highest-energy particle collider before the LHC. (The top quark was discovered there in 1995.) This proximity taught her that a particle physicist was a thing you could be. Later, it turned out to be her thing. \u201cWhat are the fundamental building blocks of the universe \u2014 those were the questions that I was most interested in knowing the answer to,\u201d she told me. \u201cBut what people said was, \u2018Particle physics is dead. Don\u2019t do this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It may have been a fair warning; Cesarotti has yet to land a permanent job as a rising particle physicist. The subfield has continued to shrink, she and others said, as faculty hiring committees and grad students go in other directions. \u201cDefinitely all this rhetoric that there was nothing to be found and you should give up on it \u2014 people listened,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd of course that means there are fewer people. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you\u2019re pushing all these talented people out of trying to solve these problems into a field that it\u2019s easier to make an impact on, then you\u2019re setting yourself up for failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cesarotti echoed a sentiment I\u2019d heard from others, which sounds correct to me as well: \u201cParticle physics isn\u2019t dead; it\u2019s just hard.\u201d It\u2019s hard to know what to think about or look for. But the most devoted particle physicists are thinking and looking all the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was easy for 125 years,\u201d Strassler said. \u201cOne thing led to the next. That lucky century has, for now, at least in the medium term, come to an end. That could change tomorrow, or next century, or who knows.\u201d<\/p>\n

A hint of a new lightweight particle could, in theory, show up at the LHC, or in some other experiment. Strassler is particularly excited about the study of radioactive thorium-229 decay<\/a>, which could reveal variations in the fundamental constants. I\u2019m slightly partial to experiments looking for \u201caxions,\u201d<\/a> dark matter candidates that are so lightweight that they can act a little like light itself.<\/p>\n

On the theory side, an obvious solution to the hierarchy problem could drop naturally out of the geometry behind scattering amplitudes. Or, if Kaplan is right, AI systems might someday suggest powerful new ideas for how the 25 particles of the Standard Model fit into a more comprehensive pattern \u2014 a possibility I didn\u2019t foresee back when the crisis began.<\/p>\n

Clearly, further progress toward the truth remains possible in particle physics. But there\u2019s no discovery guarantee. I\u2019ve had more than 13 years to think about it, and it remains a disturbing prospect: All the empirical clues we can glean about nature\u2019s fundamental laws and building blocks might already be in hand. The universe may plan on keeping the rest of its secrets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This brain drain appears to be real. I spoke to Jared Kaplan, co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[49,48,314,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-434876","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-physics","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}