“Drain the swamp!”

In the intense first few months of his second US presidency, Donald Trump has been enacting his old campaign promise with a vengeance. He’s ridding all the muck from the American federal bureaucracy, he claims, and finally bringing it back under control.

Scientific projects and institutions are particular targets of his, with one recent casualty being the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). Outsiders might shrug their shoulders at a panel of scientists being axed. Panels come and go. Also, any development in Washington these days is accompanied by confusion, uncertainty, and the possibility of reversal.

But HEPAP’s dissolution is different. Set up in 1967, it’s been a valuable and long-standing advisory committee of the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy (DOE). HEPAP has a distinguished track record of developing, supporting and reviewing high-energy physics programmes, setting priorities and balancing different areas. Many scientists are horrified by its axing.

The terminator

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders – presidential decrees that do not need Congressional approval, legislative review or public debate. One order, which he signed in February, was entitled “Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy”.

It sought to reduce parts of the government “that the President has determined are unnecessary”, seeking to eliminate “waste and abuse, reduce inflation, and promote American freedom and innovation”. While supporters see those as laudable goals, opponents believe the order is driving a stake into the heart of US science.

Hugely valuable, long-standing scientific advisory committees have been axed at key federal agencies, including NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Geological Service, the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

What’s more, the committees were terminated without warning or debate, eliminating load-bearing pillars of the US science infrastructure. It was, as the Columbia University sociologist Gil Eyal put it in a recent talk, the “Trump 2.0 Blitzkrieg”.

Then, on 30 September, Trump’s enablers took aim at advisory committees at the DOE Office of Science. According to the DOE’s website, a new Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC) will take over functions of the six former discretionary (non-legislatively mandated) Office of Science advisory committees.

“Any current charged responsibilities of these former committees will be transferred to the SCAC,” the website states matter-of-factly. The committee will provide “independent, consensus advice regarding complex scientific and technical issues” to the entire Office of Science. Its members will be appointed by under secretary for science Dario Gil – a political appointee.

Apart from HEPAP, others axed without warning were the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, and the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee.

Over the years, each committee served a different community and was represented by prominent research scientists who were closely in touch with other researchers. Each committee could therefore assemble the awareness of – and technical knowledge about – emerging promising initiatives and identify the less promising ones.

Many committee members only learned of the changes when they received letters or e-mails out of the blue informing them that their committee had been dissolved, that a new committee had replaced them, and that they were not on it. No explanation was given.

Closing HEPAP and the other Office of Science committees will hamper both the technical support and community input that it has relied on to promote the efficient, effective and robust growth of physics

Physicists whom I have spoken to are appalled for two main reasons. One is that closing HEPAP and the other Office of Science committees will hamper both the technical support and community input that it has relied on to promote the efficient, effective and robust growth of physics.

“Speaking just for high-energy physics, HEPAP gave feedback on the DOE and NSF funding strategies and priorities for the high-energy physics experiments,” says Kay Kinoshita from the University of Cincinnati, a former HEPAP member. “The panel system provided a conduit for information between the agencies and the community, so the community felt heard and the agencies were (mostly) aligned with the community consensus”.

As Kinoshita continued: “There are complex questions that each panel has to deal with. even within the topical area. It’s hard to see how a broader panel is going to make better strategic decisions, ‘better’ meaning in terms of scientific advancement. In terms of community buy-in I expect it will be worse.”

Other physicists cite a second reason for alarm. The elimination of the advisory committees spreads the expertise so thinly as to increase the likelihood of political pressure on decisions. “If you have one committee you are not going to get the right kind of fine detail,” says Michael Lubell, a physicist and science-policy expert at the City College of New York, who has sat in on meetings of most of the Office of Science advisory committees.

“You’ll get opinions from people outside that area and you won’t be able to get information that you need as a policy maker to decide how the resources are to be allocated,” he adds. “A condensed-matter physicist for example, would probably have insufficient knowledge to advise DOE on particle physics. Instead, new committee members would be expected to vet programs based on ideological conformity to what the Administration wants.”

The critical point

At the end of the Second World War, the US began to construct an ambitious long-range plan to promote science that began with the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950 and developed and extended ever since. The plan aimed to incorporate both the ability of elected politicians to direct science towards social needs and the independence of scientists to explore what is possible.

US presidents have, of course, had pet scientific projects: the War on Cancer (Nixon), the Moon Shot (Kennedy), promoting renewable energy (Carter), to mention a few. But it is one thing for a president to set science to producing a socially desirable product and another to manipulate the scientific process itself.

“This is another sad day for American science,” says Lubell. “If I were a young person just embarking on a career, I would get the hell out of the country. I would not want to waste the most creative years of my life waiting for things to turn around, if they ever do. What a way to destroy a legacy!”

The end of HEPAP is not draining a swamp but creating one.

The post Is Donald Trump conducting a ‘blitzkrieg’ on science? appeared first on Physics World.

Imagine you had a bad breakup in college. Your ex-partner is furious and self-publishes a book that names you in its title. You’re so humiliated that you only dimly remember this ex, though the book’s details and anecdotes ring true.

According to the book, you used to be inventive, perceptive and dashing. Then you started hanging out with the wrong crowd, and became competitive, self-involved and incapable of true friendship. Your ex struggles to turn you around; failing, they leave. The book, though, is so over-the-top that by the end you stop cringing and find it a hoot.

That’s how I think most Physics World readers will react to The Ant Mill: How Theoretical High-energy Physics Descended into Groupthink, Tribalism and Mass Production of Research. Its author and self-publisher is the Danish mathematician-physicist Jesper Grimstrup, whose previous book was Shell Beach: the Search for the Final Theory.

After receiving his PhD in theoretical physics at the Technical University of Vienna in 2002, Grimstrup writes, he was “one of the young rebels” embarking on “a completely unexplored area” of theoretical physics, combining elements of loop quantum gravity and noncommutative geometry. But there followed a decade of rejected articles and lack of opportunities.

Grimstrup became “disillusioned, disheartened, and indignant” and in 2012 left the field, selling his flat in Copenhagen to finance his work. Grimstrup says he is now a “self-employed researcher and writer” who lives somewhere near the Danish capital. You can support him either through Ko-fi or Paypal.

Fomenting fear

The Ant Mill opens with a copy of the first page of the letter that Grimstrup’s fellow Dane Niels Bohr sent in 1917 to the University of Copenhagen successfully requesting a four-storey building for his physics institute. Grimstrup juxtaposes this incident with the rejection of his funding request, almost a century later, by the Danish Council for Independent Research.

Today, he writes, theoretical physics faces a situation “like the one it faced at the time of Niels Bohr”, but structural and cultural factors have severely hampered it, making it impossible to pursue promising new ideas. These include Grimstrup’s own “quantum holonomy theory, which is a candidate for a fundamental theory”. The Ant Mill is his diagnosis of how this came about.

The Standard Model of particle physics, according to Grimstrup, is dominated by influential groups that squeeze out other approaches

A major culprit, in Grimstrup’s eyes, was the Standard Model of particle physics. That completed a structure for which theorists were trained to be architects and should have led to the flourishing of a new crop of theoretical ideas. But it had the opposite effect. The field, according to Grimstrup, is now dominated by influential groups that squeeze out other approaches.

The biggest and most powerful is string theory, with loop quantum gravity its chief rival. Neither member of the coterie can make testable predictions, yet because they control jobs, publications and grants they intimidate young researchers and create what Grimstrup calls an “undercurrent of fear”. (I leave assessment of this claim to young theorists.)

Roughly half the chapters begin with an anecdote in which Grimstrup describes an instance of rejection by a colleague, editor or funding agency. In the book’s longest chapter Grimstrup talks about his various rejections – by the Carlsberg Foundation, The European Physics Journal C, International Journal of Modern Physics A, Classical and Quantum Gravity, Reports on Mathematical Physics, Journal of Geometry and Physics and the Journal of Noncommutative Geometry.

Grimstrup says that the reviewers and editors of these journals told him that his papers variously lacked concrete physical results, were exercises in mathematics, seemed the same as other papers, or lacked “relevance and significance”. Grimstrup sees this as the coterie’s handiwork, for such journals are full of string theory papers open to the same criticism.

“Science is many things,” Grimstrup writes at the end. “[S]imultaneously boring and scary, it is both Indiana Jones and anonymous bureaucrats, and it is precisely this diversity that is missing in the modern version of science.” What the field needs is “courage…hunger…ambition…unwillingness to compromise…anarchy”.

Grimstrup hopes that his book will have an impact, helping to inspire young researchers to revolt, and to make all the scientific bureaucrats and apparatchiks and bookkeepers and accountants “wake up and remember who they truly are”.

The critical point

The Ant Mill is an example of what I have called “rant literature” or rant-lit. Evangelical, convinced that exposing truth will make sinners come to their senses and change their evil ways, rant lit can be fun to read, for it is passionate and full of florid metaphors.

Theoretical physicists, Grimstrup writes, have become “obedient idiots” and “technicians” (the phrase appearing in an e-mail cited in the book that was written by an unidentified person with whom the author disagrees). Theoretical physics, he suggests, has become a “kingdom”, a “cult”, a “hamster wheel” and “ant mill”, in which the ants march around in a pre-programmed “death spiral”.

Grimstrup hammers away at theories lacking falsifiability, but his vehemence invites you to ask: “Is falsifiability really the sole criterion for deciding whether to accept or fail to pursue a theory?”

An attentive reader, however, may come away with a different lesson. Grimstrup calls falsifiability the “crown jewel of the natural sciences” and hammers away at theories lacking it. But his vehemence invites you to ask: “Is falsifiability really the sole criterion for deciding whether to accept or fail to pursue a theory?”

In his 2013 book String Theory and the Scientific Method, for instance, the Stockholm University philosopher of science Richard Dawid suggested rescuing the scientific status of string theory by adding such non-empirical criteria to evaluating theories as clarity, coherence and lack of alternatives. It’s an approach that both rescues the formalistic approach to the scientific method and undermines it.

Dawid, you see, is making the formalism follow the practice rather than the other way around. In other words, he is able to reformulate how we make theories because he already knows how theorizing works – not because he only truly knows what it is to theorize after he gets the formalism right.

Grimstrup’s rant, too, might remind you of the birth of the Yang–Mills theory in 1954. Developed by Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills, it was a theory of nuclear binding that integrated much of what was known about elementary particle theory but implied the existence of massless force-carrying particles that then were known not to exist. In fact, at one seminar Wolfgang Pauli unleashed a tirade against Yang for proposing so obviously flawed a theory.

The theory, however, became central to theoretical physics two decades later, after theorists learned more about the structure of the world. The Yang–Mills story, in other words, reveals that theory-making does not always conform to formal strictures and does not always require a testable prediction. Sometimes it just articulates the best way to make sense of the world apart from proof or evidence.

The lesson I draw is that becoming the target of a rant might not always make you feel repentant and ashamed. It might inspire you into deep reflection on who you are in a way that is insightful and vindicating. It might even make you more rather than less confident about why you’re doing what you’re doing

Your ex, of course, would be horrified.

• Jesper Grimstrup published an entry on his blog, dated 1 November 2025, expressing his views on this review.

The post Jesper Grimstrup’s <em>The Ant Mill</em>: could his anti-string-theory rant do string theorists a favour? appeared first on Physics World.