Professor Mark Thomson, a British physicist who is to head the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire — CERN) from January 1, 2026, has said that advanced artificial intelligence should revolutionize fundamental physics and open a window into the fate of the universe.
Professor Mark Thomson, a British physicist who is to head the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire — CERN) from January 1, 2026, has said that advanced artificial intelligence should revolutionize fundamental physics and open a window into the fate of the universe.
«There is a special measurement of the Higgs boson that is so fundamental to the nature of the universe. What we will be looking at is the formation of not one Higgs boson, but two Higgs bosons at the same time,» said Mark Thomson, writes Geardian, talking about the impact of artificial intelligence on the development of physics at the subatomic scale. According to him, AI will allow unprecedented observation of the Higgs boson, which is called the God particle, which gives mass to other particles and unifies the universe.
Two Higgs bosons appearing at the same time are extremely rare, and the particles are so elusive because they decay into more familiar particles as soon as they appear. Thomson says that even five years ago he would have thought it was beyond the capabilities of the LHC.
The physicist notes that similar strategies are being used at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to detect incredibly rare events that hold the key to how particles gained mass in the first moments after the Big Bang. He says big discoveries could come after 2030, when a major upgrade will increase the LHC’s beam intensity by a factor of ten.
Some scientists are skeptical, given the lack of grand results at the LHC since the landmark discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
But Dr Catherine Leni, who works on the LHC Atlas experiment, also highlighted the importance of AI in such research. Artificial intelligence is being embedded in every aspect of the LHC’s operation, from deciding what data to collect to how it is interpreted. «When the LHC collides with protons, it does about 40 million collisions per second, and we have to make decisions within a microsecond… which events are interesting, which we want to keep, and which we want to throw away,» said Dr Catherine Leni. She said AI has advanced research by at least 20 years.
Scientists have long hoped that the LHC could produce dark matter, the substance thought to make up much of the universe, but the task is a daunting one. Mark Thomson is confident that generative artificial intelligence can help make progress on this.
