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.)

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”. He slams theoretical physics for becoming 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.

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.

Call it millennial, generation Y or fin de siècle, high-energy physics during the last two decades of the 20th century had a special flavour. The principal pieces of the Standard Model of particle physics had come together remarkably tightly – so tightly, in fact, that physicists had to rethink what instruments to build, what experiments to plan, and what theories to develop to move forward. But it was also an era when the hub of particle physics moved from the US to Europe.

The momentous events of the 1980s and 1990s will be the focus of the 4th International Symposium on the History of Particle Physics, which is being held on 10–13 November at CERN. The meeting will take place more than four decades after the first symposium in the series was held at Fermilab near Chicago in 1980. Entitled The Birth of Particle Physics, that initial meeting covered the years 1930 to 1950.

Speakers back then included trailblazers such as Paul Dirac, Julian Schwinger and Victor Weisskopf. They reviewed discoveries such as the neutron and the positron and the development of relativistic quantum field theory. Those two decades before 1950 were a time when particle physicists “constructed the room”, so to speak, in which the discipline would be based.

The second symposium – Pions to Quarks – was also held at Fermilab and covered the 1950s. Accelerators could now create particles seen in cosmic-ray collisions, populating what Robert Oppenheimer called the “particle zoo”. Certain discoveries of this era, such as parity violation in the weak interaction, were so shocking that C N Yang likened it to having a blackout and not knowing if the room would look the same when the lights came back on. Speakers at that 1985 event included Luis Alvarez, Val Fitch, Abdus Salam, Robert Wilson and Yang himself.

The third symposium, The Rise of the Standard Model, was held in Stanford, California, in 1992 and covered the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time not of blackouts but of disruptions that dimmed the lights. Charge-parity violation and the existence of two types of neutrino were found in the 1960s, followed in the 1970s by deep inelastic electron scattering and quarks, neutral currents, a fourth quark and gluon jets.

These discoveries decimated alternative approaches to quantum field theory, which was duly established for good as the skeleton of high-energy physics. The era culminated with Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg winning the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics for their part in establishing the Standard Model. Speakers at that third symposium included Murray Gell-Mann, Leon Lederman and Weinberg himself.

Changing times

The upcoming CERN event, on whose programme committee I serve, will start exactly where the previous symposium ended. “1980 is a natural historical break,” says conference co-organizer Michael Riordan, who won the 2025 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics. “It begins a period of the consolidation of the Standard Model. Colliders became the main instruments, and were built with specific standard-model targets in mind. And the centre of gravity of the discipline moved across the Atlantic to Europe.”

The conference will address physics that took place at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), where the W and Z particles were discovered in 1983. It will also examines the SPS’s successor – the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider. Opened in 1989, it was used to make precise measurements of these and other implications of the Standard Model until being controversially shut down in 2000 to make way for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

There will be coverage as well of failed accelerator projects, which – perhaps perversely – can be equally interesting and revealing as successful facilities

Speakers at the meeting will also discuss Fermilab’s Tevatron, where the top quark – another Standard Model component – was found in 1995. Work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, DESY in Germany, and Tsukuba, Japan, will be tackled too. There will be coverage as well of failed accelerator projects, which – perhaps perversely – can be equally interesting and revealing as successful facilities.

In particular, I will speak about ISABELLE, a planned and partially built proton–proton collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was terminated in 1983 to make way for the far more ambitious Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). ISABELLE was then transformed into the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was completed in 1999 and took nuclear physics into the high-energy regime.

Riordan will talk about the fate of the SSC, which was supposed to discover the Higgs boson or whatever else plays its mass-generating role. But in 1993 the US Congress terminated that project, a traumatic episode for US physics, about which Riordan co-authored the book Tunnel Visions. Its cancellation signalled the end of the glory years for US particle physics and the realization of the need for international collaborations in ever-costlier accelerator projects.

The CERN meeting will also explore more positive developments such as the growing convergence of particle physics and cosmology during the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, researchers stepped up their studies of dark matter, neutrino oscillations and supernovas. It was a period that saw the construction of underground detectors at Gran Sasso in Italy and Kamiokande in Japan.

Other themes to be explored include the development of the Web – which transformed the world – and the impact of globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of high-energy physics in China, and physics in Russia, former Soviet Union republics, and former Eastern Bloc countries. While particle physics became more global, it also grew more dependent on, and vulnerable to, changing political ambitions, economic realities and international collaborations. The growing importance of diversity, communication and knowledge transfer will be looked at too.

The critical point

The years between 1980 and 2000 were a distinct period in the history of particle physics. It took place in the afterglow of the triumph of the Standard Model. The lights in high energy physics did not go out or even dim, to use Yang’s metaphor. Instead, the Standard Model shed so much light on high-energy physics that the effort and excitement focused around consolidating the model.

Particle physics, during those years, was all about finding the deeply hidden outstanding pieces, developing the theory, and connecting with other areas of physics. The triumph was so complete that physicists began to wonder what bigger and more comprehensive structure the Standard Model’s “room” might be embedded in – what was “beyond the Standard Model”. A quarter of a century on, our attempt to make out that structure is still an ongoing task.

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