I read this article https://spectrum.ieee.org/particle-physics-ai —some breathless thing about AI and particle physics, with the usual quote about needing an AlphaGo for physics, a genius machine to see the world sideways. Sure, AI can do the party tricks—solving equations, all that—but foundational physics isn’t a protein folding contest, and it’s not some cosmic Sudoku either. AI can chew through the math problems you hand it after you’ve already built the problem and methods. But the real work, the kind that matters, isn’t just about solving a puzzle once you know the rules. It’s about finding the rules or realizing the rules are wrong, or that there’s a whole other game happening under your nose.

Finding the rules isn’t just pattern recognition from data. It’s more like  some itch in your skull that says the world isn’t lining up with the symbols and stories we use to cage it and catching a whiff of something good from a distance. You have to sniff out the metaphysical stowaways, call them out, discard them if you have to—even when they’ve been engineered to look like they belong. This is emotional work. It’s gut-level.

The article’s written by particle physicists, of course. Let them chase whatever they want. But the whole vibe is this: new physics means new particles. The method is the same old song—speculate about some microdynamics, scribble out a Lagrangian, try to stitch it to the Standard Model. But nature doesn’t owe us that. Maybe we’ll find new particles. Maybe we won’t. Maybe the whole thing is a dead end. The method—guessing with flimsy evidence—might not even be physics anymore. So what does AI do here? It just plays along inside that same box, like a clever grad student, when we don’t even know if the box is real.

And the whole chase for an "AI genius physicist"—the authors don’t even seem to know what a genius is. Hell, I don’t know what a genius in physics looks like, but I know it’s not some one-size-fits-all circus act. Genius is a local phenomenon. You can be a math genius and a physics idiot, or a musical genius and a math idiot, all in the same skin. Even inside physics, what counts as genius in one era is just regular in another. The article’s idea of genius is stuck in the HEP culture of the 90s and 2000s.

Take Einstein's 1905 relativity paper. AI wouldn’t have replaced his leap, the way he rethought the whole problem. AI wouldn’t have spotted those two simple postulates, probably wouldn’t have tossed out the aether either. What it might have done, if it had been lurking around back then, is grind through the symbolic manipulations once Einstein had already set the stage. You’d bark out, "Find the linear transformation that satisfies these constraints," and the machine would come back, wagging its tail, with exactly what you asked for. No more, no less.

And the real kicker? In HEP culture, the kind of skills humans have are exactly what gets discouraged, and the kind of skills AI has are exactly what’s been prized, at least for the last two or three decades. It’s like the whole system was built to reward the machine and punish the animal.