Science
Why a Yale Physicist Is Rethinking Science in the Age of AI
Can a machine that writes fluent sentences also do physics? Sarah Demers, who chairs Yale University's physics department and hunts for signals of the Higgs boson at CERN, is asking what skills survive as large language models enter research labs.
3,000 physicistsScientists in the ATLAS collaboration at CERN
The facts
- 1Sarah Demers chairs the physics department at Yale University and works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
- 2She is examining how large language models are entering physics, noting the tools can both speed up and undermine careful research work.
- 3ATLAS is one of the LHC's largest detectors, run by a collaboration of roughly 3,000 physicists from more than 40 countries.
- 4Large language models can draft code, summarize papers, and suggest hypotheses quickly, but they can also produce confident-sounding errors that go unchecked without expert review.
- 5Demers's concern reflects a wider debate among scientists about which human skills, like judgment and skepticism, remain essential as AI tools spread through research.
Why it matters
As AI tools spread into labs worldwide, the debate over which human skills matter most could shape how future discoveries, from particle physics to medicine, are checked and trusted.
Sources
- Quanta Magazine
- Yale University
- CERN
