For now, a math item and a physics item, maybe more later…
- Four years ago, after the decision to have the 2026 ICM in the US was announced, I wrote:
With the 2022 experience in mind, hopefully the IMU will for next time have prepared a plan for what to do in case they again end up having a host country with a collapsed democracy being run by a dangerous autocrat.
We’re very much in that situation now, and as far as I can tell the IMU is still planning for a normal, in-person event this July in Philadelphia.
The French mathematical society (SMF) announced yesterday that they would not participate (in the sense of not having a presence such as a booth) in the ICM this year. I’m hearing that other national math societies have taken or are considering similar action.
Setting aside the problem of lots of people for good reason not wanting anything to do with travel to the US right now, even those who do want to come here are facing serious problems getting a visa, in particular not being able to even get an appointment for a visa interview at this time.
The murders and Gestapo tactics now going on in Minneapolis surely influenced the SMF decision and may cause people now planning on attending the ICM to change their plans. The nightmare scenario for ICM organizers is having ICE and its thuggery move on to Philadelphia, which unfortunately seems possible.
- Natalie Wolchover has a very good article at Quanta with the title Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying or Just Hard? Where I come down on the question is that fundamental theory is all of the above (Hard, Dead, and Dying).
Some of the themes she covers were ones I was trying to write about already 20 years ago here in the blog and in my book. A major theme of that book was that, in retrospect, the Standard Model that fell into place in 1973 turned out to be spectacularly successful: everything that it predicted turned out to be exactly what was measured, and no “new physics” that it doesn’t describe has turned up (beyond the minor addition of neutrino mass terms). So, in 1973 all of sudden, finding something fundamentally new in particle theory became very hard (the experimentalists had lots of challenging work to do exploring the 1 GeV to 1 TeV mass range, checking that what the SM predicted was there and nothing else was).
The crisis that developed in fundamental theory was not just that it had become hard, with new progress a difficult, long-term effort. It’s that the field could not change its way of doing business to accommodate this. Instead of encouraging a long-term effort to attack the remaining fundamental problems, what was rewarded was pursuit of easy but wrong ideas that were coupled with an efficient hype machine. The path from GUTs to SUSY GUTS to compactified superstrings to the landscape was a path from one bad idea which could generate lots of papers to more and more complicated and ugly versions, finally reaching an endpoint 20 years ago of a completely empty and worthless research program (the “anthropic landscape”). Once the leaders of the field announced that their ideas were not wrong, just untestable, that part of the field died. It has now been dead for quite a while. These same leaders steadfastly refuse to acknowledge this, which is very weird.
What’s happened over the past 20 years is that the intellectual death of the heavily promoted part of the subject started to become very clear to most people, including physicists in other fields, Deans, NSF and private foundation program officers. The field has been dying as good students don’t go into it, physics departments don’t hire in it, and granting agencies don’t fund it.
Among those still with a job, most quietly have abandoned work on the well-known and failed ideas, and are trying to work on something more sensible. This is not easy: you’re not allowed to say that heavily hyped ideas were wrong and must be abandoned, have to try and find a way to do really hard work in an era of declining resources, with the PR machine for failed ideas (or new, worse ones…) trying to attract as much as possible of what’s left.
Taking up all the remaining oxygen in the room right now is AI hype, exemplified by Jared Kaplan, who is quoted in the article:
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. “I started working on AI because it seemed plausible to me that … AI was going to make progress faster than almost any field in science historically,” he said. AI would be “the most important thing to happen while we’re 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.”
As for the future of particle physics, AI makes worrying about it now rather pointless, in Kaplan’s view. “I think that it’s kind of irrelevant what we plan on a 10-year timescale, because if we’re building a collider in 10 years, AI will be building the collider; humans won’t 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. … So planning beyond this couple-year timescale isn’t really something I think about very much.”
While I find it highly likely that AI agents can do as well or better at writing the kind of bad theory papers that have dominated the literature for a long time, it seems much less likely that they can write the sort of inspired papers Witten was writing at the height of his powers (e.g. Chern-Simons-Witten, that won him a Fields medal). Since Kaplan tells me that they’ll be doing this in a couple years, not much reason to think about and debate the issue now, we’ll see soon enough.
Whether or not AI is the way to make progress, right now it’s certainly the way to get paid.
