Re:Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
by jfengel on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @04:53PM
(#46967461)
The math is hard, but I don't think that's the problem. Hard math eventually succumbs.
I think that even if AI were to find a good unification of GR and QM, we wouldn't be able to test it. We might accept it without additional confirmation if it were sufficiently natural-feeling (the way we accepted Newtonian gravity long before we could measure G), but there's no guarantee that we'd ever be able to meaningfully test it.
We could get lucky -- such a theory might point at a solution to some of the few loose threads we get out of existing collider and cosmological measurements -- but we might not. We could be stuck wishing we had a galaxy-sized collider.
Re:Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
by tim333 on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @05:33PM
(#46967923)
It might explain some of the many physics observations that we don't have explanations for like why do we have the particles we have and why those properties.
I think that even if AI were to find a good unification of GR and QM, we wouldn't be able to test it. We might accept it without additional confirmation if it were sufficiently natural-feeling (the way we accepted Newtonian gravity long before we could measure G), but there's no guarantee that we'd ever be able to meaningfully test it.
We could get lucky -- such a theory might point at a solution to some of the few loose threads we get out of existing collider and cosmological measurements -- but we might not. We could be stuck wishing we had a galaxy-sized collider.