Breakthrough Prize 2026
The 2026 Breakthrough Prizes in Fundamental Physics honored the muon g‑2 collaborations for a half‑century of magnetic‑moment measurements, awarded a special prize to Nobel laureate David Gross for his QCD and string‑theory work, introduced the Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize for early‑career women with Carolina Figueiredo as its first recipient, and recognized several early‑career researchers through the New Horizons awards.
Bonus Info for “Quantum ‘Jamming’ Explores the Truly Fundamental Principles of Nature”
A new Quanta Magazine piece explores “quantum jamming,” a speculative mechanism that could modify entanglement correlations faster than light within hypothetical super‑quantum theories. The idea challenges the standard no‑signaling rule by allowing a jammer to reshape how distant particles are...
A Window on Absolutely Everything
Quantum field theory uses the path‑integral formalism, summing every possible particle trajectory, but most contributions cancel, leaving straight‑line paths dominant. Physicists capture the remaining effects with Feynman diagrams, organizing interactions by decreasing impact. Anomalies—situations where diagram sums break required symmetries—force...
What AI Physicists Are Missing and What They Aren’t
The article argues that large language models (LLMs) are ill‑suited to replace human physicists because they cannot replicate the undocumented, tacit reasoning that underpins scientific insight. While prompting an AI demands precision, it offers little pedagogical value compared with hands‑on...
ArXiv to Leave Cornell
arXiv.org announced it will leave Cornell University and establish an independent nonprofit to manage the preprint repository. The change is designed to streamline philanthropic funding by removing Cornell as an intermediary and to safeguard the platform from institutional pressure. Since...
About the OpenAI Amplitudes Paper, but Not as Much as You’d Like
OpenAI partnered with amplitude researchers to use an internal LLM, dubbed GPT‑5.2 Pro, to conjecture and prove a simplified scattering‑amplitude formula (equation 39) in a twelve‑hour run. The accompanying paper and press release provide scant detail on prompts, model outputs, or...
Hypothesis: If AI Is Bad at Originality, It’s a Documentation Problem
OpenAI teamed with particle‑physics amplitudes researchers to apply reasoning‑type language models to a puzzling non‑zero calculation. The AI iteratively generated a compact formula and mathematically proved its correctness, turning a messy multi‑particle result into a simple expression. The breakthrough highlights...