This brain drain appears to be real. We spoke to Jared Kaplan, co-founder of Anthropic, who developed the chatbot Claude. The last time we spoke, he was a physicist. As a graduate student at Harvard University in the 2000s, he collaborated with renowned theorist Nima al-Kanihamed to pioneer new directions in amplitude research that are actively pursued today. However, Kaplan left the field in 2019. “I started working on AI because it seemed plausible to me that AI would advance faster than almost any other field of science in history,” he said. AI is “one of the most important things to happen in our lifetimes, and probably in the history of science, so it seemed obvious to me that I should work on it.”

In Kaplan’s view, the advent of AI has made it rather pointless to worry about the future of particle physics. “I think what we’re planning on a 10-year timescale is in some ways irrelevant. If we’re going to build a collider in 10 years, AI is going to build a collider, because humans aren’t going to build one in two or three years. I think there’s about a 50% chance that most theoretical physicists will be replaced by AI. Great people like Nima Al-Kani-Hamed and Ed Witten will produce papers as good as theirs.” …So I don’t really think about planning beyond the timescale of these few years. ”

Kari Cesarotti, a postdoctoral researcher in CERN’s Theory Group, is skeptical about its future. She realized that chatbots were wrong and that they were too much of a hindrance for physics students. “AI is making people increasingly bad at physics,” she says. “What we need are people who read textbooks and sit down and think of new solutions to problems of hierarchy.”

Cesarotti was a senior in high school when the Higgs boson was discovered. She grew up near Fermilab, the US national laboratory in Illinois that housed the Tevatron, the world’s most energetic particle collider before the LHC. (The top quark was discovered there in 1995.) This proximity taught her to become a particle physicist. It was later revealed that she thing. “What are the fundamental building blocks of the universe? Those were the questions I was most interested in knowing the answers to,” she told me. “But what people said was, ‘Particle physics is over. Don’t do this.'”

Maybe that was a fair warning. Cesarotti is an up-and-coming particle physicist who has not yet found a regular job. They say the field continues to shrink as faculty hiring committees and graduate students move in other directions. “The rhetoric that we should give up because we’re not going to find anything was definitely there, and people listened,” she said. “And of course that means fewer people. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take all these talented people out of the effort to solve these problems and move them into areas where they can have more impact, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

Cesarotti echoes opinions I’ve heard from others, and this rings true to me: “Particle physics isn’t dead, it’s just hard.” It’s hard to know what to think or what to look for. But the most dedicated particle physicists all think the same thing and think the same way.

“It’s been easy for 125 years,” Strassler said. “One thing led to another century. That lucky century has come to an end for now, at least in the medium term. It could be tomorrow, next century, or who knows.”

Hints of new lightweight particles could theoretically emerge at the LHC or other experiments. Strassler is particularly excited about the upcoming research. Radioactive thorium-229 decaywhich may reveal variations in fundamental constants. I’m a little biased Experiments searching for “axions” A dark matter candidate that is so lightweight that it can behave like light itself.

On the theoretical side, an obvious solution to the hierarchy problem may naturally follow from the geometry behind the scattering amplitudes. Or, if Kaplan is right, the AI ​​system might one day suggest powerful new ideas about how the Standard Model’s 25 particles fit into a more comprehensive pattern. I did not foresee this possibility at the beginning of the crisis.

Clearly, further progress toward the truth is possible in particle physics. However, there is no guarantee that it will be discovered. I’ve been thinking about it for over 13 years and it’s still an uneasy prospect. All the empirical clues that can be gleaned about the fundamental laws and building blocks of nature may already be available. Maybe the universe plans to keep the rest of its secrets safe.