First of all, three new books of interest:
- Jesper Grimstrup has written a book titled The Ant Mill: how theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism, and mass production of research. There’s a lot more about the book at his substack. I’ve contributed a foreword.
Grimstrup has spent a lot of time thinking about what is going on in the fundamental theoretical physics research community, partly based on his own experiences, together with looking at some data he has gathered and analyzed (with Jarl Sidelmann, see here). Twenty years ago Lee Smolin and I drew attention to these problems, which in many ways have gotten significantly worse since then. I hope Grimstrup’s book gets some people thinking seriously about what can be done.
- Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper have a new book out, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins. If you’re in London this week you can hear them talk about it in person.
The book covers a huge range of speculative ideas about the Big Bang, including a lot of stories based on Afshordi’s experiences as a researcher in the field. This is a subject I’ve never paid that close attention to, so I learned quite a bit from the book. It’s not a superficial overview, but fairly dense with information.
While going through all this was interesting, it did leave me reminded of why I’ve never spent much time on these topics. There’s no real role for deep mathematics and the whole business has stayed unfortunately divorced from any successful confrontation with experiment. The situation is kind of like that in particle theory and Afshordi recognizes some of the same problems Grimstrup discusses. There’s a successful standard model of cosmology, but nobody has had any success in going beyond it. One is in danger of doing something more like religion than science in a way that makes me queasy. Afshordi has a lot of discussion of this in the book, and see some slides of his from a talk here.
- A fascinating book about mathematics and thinking, Mathematica by David Bessis, is now available in paperback. For more about this, I’ll refer you to a review by Michael Harris of the original French edition.
In positive news about science funding, there’s yet another new theory center, the Max Planck-IAS-NTU Center for Particle Physics, Cosmology, and Geometry. This is the second new IAS theory center in the past month, last one was the Leinweber Forum for Theoretical and Quantum Physics at IAS.
With US federal science research funding in the process of being drastically cut, an increasingly large fraction of funding for such research will be coming from the Simons Foundation. Their 2024 report is now out, with financial information here. In 2024 they were spending about $300 million in grants (there’s also more grants from the Simons Foundation International).
Update: For an interesting recent review that answers a lot of the questions about cosmology that have always bothered me (and provides a good supplement to the Afshordi/Halper book), see here.
Thank you for these notes on books. Michael Harris’s review, which you linked to, shows an image from the Bessis book with a simple line drawing of an elephant. The caption suggests that when you turn the book 90 degrees anti-clockwise, you will see something else. I can’t see it for the life of me. Can anyone else?
In physics news, Tommaso blogged about the disappearance of the muon g-2 anomaly: https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/the_anomaly_that_wasnt_an_example_of_shifting_consensus_in_science-257457
Annoyingly, he didn’t actually link to the paper, but it seems to be this one:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21476
It doesn’t seem to have made a big splash, because I think a lot of people expected this outcome and it’s a pretty anti-climactic resolution. But for me it’s interesting because when I was in physics, lattice QCD was famed for its lack of precision, so it’s a nice to see the progress that has been made that it can now be used with confidence in a precision calculation like that.
Bah, replying to myself to save anyone else the trouble: I found an ebook copy of Bessis’s book, located the elephant, and read on. The “hint” to turn the page 90 degrees is not in Bessis’s book, only in this review, and it’s a red herring. For the “illusion” is as follows, in Bessis’s words: “The most extraordinary thing about this illusion is that it takes quite a bit of effort to make it go away. It’s nearly impossible not to see an elephant. And yet, if you look closely, you’ll notice that there is no elephant, just ink on a page. Between ink on page and an elephant, the difference is indisputably massive. What mysterious phenomenon makes us see an elephant where there’s only ink on a page? This type of optical illusion is nowadays called a drawing.”
In ABC conjecture news, K. Joshi has uploaded a preprint with his final report on the controversy. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10568
Thank you for the reference for Jesper’s book, I bought a copy and cannot put it down (I’m in the middle of it now). As a (lowly, postdoctoral) mathematician (which is often referred to as a healthier cousin of theoretical physics in this kind of literature), I see many germs in the math community of the sociological effects alluded to in this book (after all, they are irremovable consequences of us being human), but as of yet nothing quite as serious or at the scale alluded to in the book. It would be very interesting for someone to do a comparative study of both fields (or maybe just subbranches of these two fields), but such a thing is so difficult. I find to truly understand what is happening in one field one needs to immerse yourself in it for decades, to not only understand the technical topics in the literature, but how we got here and why. And so few have the background to compare developments in different fields.
The book refers a lot to “visionaries” in theoretical physics and there’s so few of them. In my little branch of math there are certainly people that are known for being “big picture” people instead of being known for their ability to deal with technical details. Though they are not the norm, many of these visionaries in math are quite influential and highly revered. I don’t know if this means anything, it’s just one data point.
I’ve read your book not even wrong and Lee Smolin’s the trouble with physics. I put this book under the same line of intellectual tradition. It must be very heartening for you (despite all else) to see the young people of a new generation take up this mantle.
Finished the book, I’m still a fan. As I’m reading I find myself pondering how much he struggled in his career to come up with the insights he put into his book. In math circles it is said that the people who can give you the best life/math/career advice are not the ones who had smooth sailing all the way through, instead it is the people who struggled early in their career and yet still made it out alive: it is they who have thought long and hard about how to survive the wreckage. As someone who is currently struggling in the early career phase, I also sometimes can’t help but spend a large fraction of my time thinking: what went wrong, and went right; what is within my control, and what isn’t.
There are chapters in your book and Lee Smolin’s (and Sabine’s) books on the sociology of it all. This book is like a greatly expanded version. I really like this, and I hope to see more discussion of it in the community.
HJM,
I get a lot of requests to cover various developments related to IUT and abc like the one you link to. But I’m not seeing evidence of any change in the situation over the past few years. Experts in the field haven’t changed their opinion that there’s no abc proof, and I don’t see any reason to spend time now on further debate here on the blog about this. If Joshi’s preprints are refereed and convince experts that he has a proof, that will completely change the situation. But until that or something else happens to change things, I’ll continue to discourage debate about this here.
Peter: you have not commented on results from muon (g-2) measurement?
Shantanu,
Because it’s not very interesting. At this point the measurement and standard SM are completely consistent. Great for faith in the SM, but otherwise a disappointment.
I just finished Jesper Grimstrup’s book `The Ant Mill`; following review of his and Sidelmann’s Feb 2025 analysis of survival and competition in hep-th.
While I found the Feb 2025 analysis of great interest, the further exploration of these matters in his book `The Ant Mill` exceeded my expectations.
My scattered thoughts:
1. There are many first hand accounts. Numerous anecdotes of professional interactions (emails, ‘interactions / grillings’ by senior / host researchers of guest / junior speakers, private conversations, and group conversations at meals following talks) sketch a competitive and challenging environment. It is not a pretty picture. Many times I was left with the impression that the author is (in the words of a french mathematician described in the book) ‘brave’.
2. The bleak characterization of conditions as analogous to a morbid terminal process in the eusocial group dynamics of ants is compelling when it is clarified in chapter 8: The Formation of Strong Social Groups. This chapter follows several chapters that dive deeper into the data on survival and competition described in https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01508.
In short, while the situation can be simply described as a `a closed loop` or `the blind leading the blind` I think the characterization of the dynamics as analogous to `An Ant Mill` is on the nose. There is are compelling arguments made that `Ant Mill` is well chosen description of the conditions.
3. While the book focuses exclusively on mechanisms of social psychology and social dynamics in academia and hep-th, more general questions are raised by the health of that field of minutiae. Misbehaviors in this tiny domain of human activity do seem potentially symptomatic of much large concerns.
In short, I found Jesper Grimstrup’s `The Ant Mill` intriguing, concerning, and compelling. Highly recommended.
I too found Jesper Grimstrup’s book compelling, and at the same time depressing. because the problems that you and Lee Smolin pointed out 20 years ago are, in his analysis, even worse than they were then. Jesper’s Chapter 10 is where I see the crux of the matter: every type of research requires a healthy mix of “visionaries” and “technicians”, and when the visionaries are pushed out, and only technicians remain, progress is mundane and slow. “Democracy” means that technicians vote for technicians, and the necessary visionaries, who, by definition, do not have the technical skills in a narrow area that the technicians admire, are voted out. In the current situation, in which extremely sophisticated technical skills have proved completely useless, it is essential to promote the visionaries, even if 90 % of them turn out to be crackpots.