In an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures
Sarah Demers, who is co-authoring a policy statement about the use of AI in physics, has never typed anything into Claude or ChatGPT.
莎拉·德默斯 (Sarah Demers) 正在共同撰写一份关于人工智能在物理学中的应用的政策声明，她从未在 Claude 或 ChatGPT 中输入过任何内容。
In July 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy selected 278 projects to fund as part of its Genesis Mission, meant to incorporate artificial intelligence into the scientific process.
2026 年 7 月，美国能源部选择了 278 个项目作为其创世任务的一部分进行资助，旨在将人工智能纳入科学过程。
One project will use AI to help physicists search for a vanishingly rare particle transformation — a muon becoming an electron — by controlling different aspects of the Mu2e experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago.
一个项目将使用人工智能来帮助物理学家寻找一种极其罕见的粒子转变——μ子变成电子——通过控制芝加哥附近费米国家加速器实验室的 Mu2e 实验的不同方面。
“We have all of these knobs that we can turn to optimize our experiment,” said Sarah Demers, who works on Mu2e.
“我们拥有所有这些旋钮来优化我们的实验，”Mu2e 工作人员 Sarah Demers 说。
“For example, how long do we run with our magnetic fields on?
“例如，我们在磁场作用下跑步多久？
And at what strength do our magnetic fields run?
我们的磁场以什么强度运行？
Where is our target placed?
我们的目标放在哪里？
Which ones of our systems need to be online?”
我们的哪些系统需要联网？”
Demers appreciates how AI may help to make quick adjustments to the experimental setup.
德默斯很欣赏人工智能如何帮助快速调整实验设置。
“Sometimes it can feel like it’s more of an art than a science, to tune these machines,” she said.
“有时，调整这些机器会让人感觉更像是一门艺术，而不是一门科学，”她说。
“Having AI capabilities help us populate that space is a godsend.”
“拥有人工智能能力可以帮助我们填充这个空间，这是天赐之物。”
But Demers, the chair of the physics department at Yale University, does not welcome AI into other areas of her work, or her life.
但耶鲁大学物理系主任德默斯并不欢迎人工智能进入她工作或生活的其他领域。
Some of her reservations about the technology stem from the fact that popular large language models (LLMs) are trained on datasets full of others’ intellectual property — likely including Demers’ own writing — and don’t properly credit their sources.
她对这项技术的一些保留意见源于这样一个事实：流行的大型语言模型（LLM）是在充满其他人知识产权的数据集上进行训练的——可能包括德默斯自己的著作——并且没有正确地相信它们的来源。
In light of new developments in AI, physicists are having existential conversations about what it means to do physics research.
鉴于人工智能的新发展，物理学家正在就物理研究的意义进行存在主义对话。
“Confronting that — what is physics, really?
“面对这个问题——物理学到底是什么？
What is enduring about the practice of physics itself?
物理学实践本身有何持久的魅力？
— that does not change with AI,” said Demers, who is leading an effort through the American Physical Society (APS) to produce an AI policy statement.
——这不会随着人工智能而改变，”德默斯说，他正在通过美国物理学会（APS）领导一项制定人工智能政策声明的工作。
“Coming to terms with that, and articulating that, is useful.”
“接受这一点并阐明这一点是有用的。”
Demers (left) talks with colleagues and students at Yale University.
德默斯（左）与耶鲁大学的同事和学生交谈。
Quanta spoke to Demers about AI in physics, how physicists can benefit or suffer from it, and why Demers refuses to use it to write her emails.
Quanta 与 Demers 讨论了物理学中的人工智能、物理学家如何从中受益或遭受损失，以及为什么 Demers 拒绝使用它来写电子邮件。
Multiple interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.
为了清晰起见，多次采访都经过浓缩和编辑。
I would say right now in the field of particle physics, we’re seeing the fastest changes in the theoretical physics realm.
我想说，现在在粒子物理领域，我们正在看到理论物理领域最快的变化。
The newest LLMs are massively speeding up calculations and changing the skill sets that people need in order to get from A to Z, in terms of solving a problem or answering a question.
最新的法学硕士正在极大地加快计算速度，并改变人们在解决问题或回答问题方面从头到尾所需的技能。
It’s so wrong, and it’s so incredible, simultaneously.
这是非常错误的，同时也是非常令人难以置信的。
We haven’t really figured out what all of those skills are.
我们还没有真正弄清楚所有这些技能是什么。
In some physics Ph.D. programs in the U.S., if you go back enough decades, you’ll find that there was a requirement for people to learn to read German.
在一些物理学博士学位中。在美国的项目中，如果你回顾几十年，你会发现人们需要学习阅读德语。
You had to be able to do that, because if you weren’t able to read German, you couldn’t read the important papers that were a critical part of your training.
你必须能够做到这一点，因为如果你无法阅读德语，你就无法阅读作为你培训的关键部分的重要论文。
It’s clear that moving forward with AI on the scene, we’re not going to be requiring all of the same skills.
很明显，随着人工智能在现场的发展，我们不会需要所有相同的技能。
So I’m trying to be open-minded about which of these skills really are crucial to physics of the present and the future, and which of the skills are not as central.
因此，我试图以开放的态度来看待这些技能中哪些技能对于当前和未来的物理学确实至关重要，哪些技能不是那么重要。
I think that everyone who is a practicing physicist right now needs to think about what good physics looks like: What does it mean to learn about our universe through the kinds of experimental interrogations that we’re doing?
我认为现在每个物理学家都需要思考什么是好的物理学：通过我们正在进行的各种实验探究来了解我们的宇宙意味着什么？
We have to think about keeping the field alive in the future: How are we training the next group of physicists?
我们必须考虑在未来保持这个领域的活力：我们如何培训下一批物理学家？
We have to think about the design of an experiment, the optimization of an experiment.
我们必须考虑实验的设计、实验的优化。
We have to balance the resources that we’re using, which includes the cost of doing the AI investigations.
我们必须平衡我们正在使用的资源，其中包括进行人工智能调查的成本。
We need to remember our skepticism and be careful about the hype that we’re hearing.
我们需要记住我们的怀疑态度，并对我们听到的炒作保持警惕。
Human physics is not over.
人类物理学还没有结束。
It’s also part of the scientific process that we correctly give attribution to the ideas.
我们正确地归因于这些想法也是科学过程的一部分。
If we lose that, if we lose this conversation among everyone who’s contributing, we’re attacking our foundation.
如果我们失去了这一点，如果我们失去了每个做出贡献的人之间的对话，我们就是在攻击我们的基金会。
We will lose track of what’s valid and what isn’t.
我们将忘记什么是有效的，什么是无效的。
Demers, pictured in her office at Yale, partnered with Emily Coates, a fellow professor and former member of the New York City Ballet, to write a book about physics and dance, which was published in 2019.
图为德默斯在耶鲁大学的办公室里，她与纽约市芭蕾舞团前成员、教授同事艾米丽·科茨 (Emily Coates) 合作撰写了一本关于物理和舞蹈的书，该书于 2019 年出版。
On the experimental side, we’re still playing, I think, and still trying to wrap our heads around what the potential is.
在实验方面，我认为我们仍在尝试，并且仍在努力了解其潜力。
On the ATLAS experiment [at the Large Hadron Collider], we take the output from hundreds of millions of electronic channels and have to reconstruct what we think happened, in terms of particles interacting with the detector.
在 ATLAS 实验中（大型强子对撞机），我们从数亿个电子通道中获取输出，并且必须根据粒子与探测器相互作用的方式重建我们认为发生的情况。
It requires the data to be in certain formats, and it can be very finicky.
它要求数据采用特定的格式，而且可能非常挑剔。
So the fact that we can now have data massaged for us, or get a first-draft data access framework from a coding assistant, has potential to really accelerate our analysis processes.
因此，我们现在可以为我们处理数据，或者从编码助手那里获得初稿的数据访问框架，这一事实有可能真正加速我们的分析过程。
One of the most exciting uses of AI in my field has been going back and looking at previous experiments.
人工智能在我的领域最令人兴奋的用途之一是回顾并查看以前的实验。
If I want to go back and ask a question about data from one of those experiments, I have to bring back from the dead some long-gone computing system, resurrect some code that is no longer with us, so it’s not something that made any sense to do.
如果我想回去问一个关于其中一个实验的数据的问题，我必须把一些早已消失的计算系统起死回生，复活一些不再属于我们的代码，所以这不是一件有意义的事情。
But now you’re able to take in all of the digested data, the plots that were created, or maybe even work with a dataset that’s not massaged well enough.
但现在您可以获取所有消化的数据、创建的绘图，甚至可以使用处理得不够好的数据集。
You have to ask questions carefully to make sure that it’s safe to use, but then we’re able to ask and answer questions we otherwise couldn’t.
您必须仔细提出问题，以确保它可以安全使用，但这样我们就可以提出并回答我们无法提出的问题。
Demers and her colleague Jack Harris at the Yale Wright Laboratory.
德默斯和她的同事杰克·哈里斯在耶鲁大学赖特实验室。
There are quite a few people, and I’m one of them, who are worried about intellectual property and worried about attribution.
有不少人担心知识产权、担心归属，我就是其中之一。
It’s outrageous what’s happened, right?
发生的事情太令人愤慨了，对吧？
This is a moral hazard.
这是一种道德风险。
We can’t let this stand.
我们不能让这种情况继续下去。
At the same time, there is so much excitement about the fact that you can type on your computer, and it’s like you have the halo of every thinker who’s written something surrounding you, giving you their words.
与此同时，你可以在电脑上打字这一事实让你感到非常兴奋，就好像你拥有每个思想家的光环，他们在你周围写下了一些东西，给你他们的话语。
It’s so wrong, and it’s so incredible, simultaneously.
这是非常错误的，同时也是非常令人难以置信的。
I think the area where we have the most agreement as a field is that a physicist is responsible for what is in their publication if they’re going to sign their name.
我认为作为一个领域，我们达成最多共识的领域是，如果物理学家要署名，就要对他们出版物中的内容负责。
You may not understand all of the details about how a model works — though there’s disagreement about that — but you certainly have to have a way to validate the information that comes out of it.
你可能不了解模型如何工作的所有细节——尽管对此存在分歧——但你肯定必须有一种方法来验证模型产生的信息。
Otherwise, we’re just not playing in the realm of making progress in science anymore; we’re just adding noise to the system.
否则，我们就不再致力于科学进步；我们只是给系统增加了噪音。
The AI policy statement from the APS is expected to come out around spring 2027.
APS 的人工智能政策声明预计将于 2027 年春季左右发布。
A best-case scenario is that they are able to ask and answer questions more quickly than we would have dreamed they could before.
最好的情况是他们能够比我们以前想象的更快地提出和回答问题。
It used to be that a new undergraduate who would come into my group might spend five months before they made a meaningful plot.
过去，加入我组的新本科生可能会花五个月的时间才能创作出有意义的情节。
I think we can engage new researchers more quickly, in terms of interacting with the bleeding edge of the data.
我认为我们可以更快地吸引新的研究人员，与最前沿的数据进行交互。
In a perfect world, we’ll have more time to do training on: What are the interesting questions?
在完美的世界中，我们将有更多时间进行培训：有哪些有趣的问题？
How do you go about answering those questions?
你如何回答这些问题？
Maybe those big questions that people wrestle with, maybe that can come earlier in someone’s research career, if people spend less time fighting over bugs in their code or accessing the data.
如果人们花更少的时间来解决代码中的错误或访问数据，也许人们努力解决的那些重大问题可能会在某人的研究生涯中出现得更早。
The potential for interdisciplinarity can expand even further if we manage to stay in conversation with each other, if we manage to still train people to think like physicists.
如果我们设法保持彼此对话，如果我们仍然设法训练人们像物理学家一样思考，那么跨学科的潜力可以进一步扩大。
I remember being in grad school and having a question, and this was before you could Google an answer.
我记得在读研究生时有一个问题，而这是在你可以用谷歌搜索答案之前。
The downside was, I felt humiliated all the time.
缺点是，我一直感到羞辱。
I was always having to ask somebody, “How does this work?”
我总是不得不问别人：“这是如何运作的？”
But the relief when I admitted to somebody that I didn’t know something was palpable.
但当我向某人承认我不知道某些事情时，我的解脱感是显而易见的。
It was amazing.
太棒了。
I came clean, and then we had a great conversation, and I actually learned something.
我坦白了，然后我们进行了一次愉快的交谈，我实际上学到了一些东西。
It made me make connections, both with humans, but also in my internal wiring.
它让我与人类以及我的内部线路建立联系。
It helped me learn.
它帮助我学习。
This is a place where I think the more advanced researchers are having more fun than people who are more junior.
我认为在这个地方，更高级的研究人员比初级研究人员更有趣。
If you really have enough experience, I’ve heard that an LLM can be a thought partner — a “thought partner” in quotes.
如果你真的有足够的经验，我听说法学硕士可以成为思想伙伴——引号中的“思想伙伴”。
I don’t do this, but I have colleagues for sure who find that fruitful and productive.
我不这样做，但我的同事们肯定认为这样做富有成果且富有成效。
They can very quickly get references, and they can make some progress, they can refine ideas.
他们可以很快获得参考，他们可以取得一些进展，他们可以完善想法。
That’s for an expert-level user.
这是针对专家级用户的。
You have to understand enough to know when you’re going off the rails.
你必须有足够的了解才能知道自己什么时候会出轨。
I think there are risks for more junior researchers, or people with less experience, to try to use LLMs as a thought partner.
我认为对于更多的初级研究人员或经验较少的人来说，尝试使用法学硕士作为思想伙伴是存在风险的。
That sounds dangerous to me.
这对我来说听起来很危险。
I’ll just come clean with you and tell you that I have enough objections that I’ve never typed anything into Claude or ChatGPT.
我会坦白告诉你，我有足够的反对意见，我从未在 Claude 或 ChatGPT 中输入过任何内容。
So I’m in a very weird space, personally, with this.
所以就我个人而言，我处于一个非常奇怪的空间。
As a chair of a department, as a director of graduate student research, somebody who’s advising graduate students, and chairing the Panel on Public Affairs for APS, I feel like I have an obligation to understand enough about the landscape so that I can comment on it, and advocate for people and help educate people.
作为系主任、研究生研究主任、为研究生提供建议的人以及 APS 公共事务小组的主席，我觉得我有义务充分了解这一情况，以便我能够对其进行评论，为人们辩护并帮助教育人们。
I find that I’m consuming a lot of content and reading a lot of papers.
我发现我消耗了大量的内容并阅读了很多论文。
My group is involved in the Genesis Mission, so we have funding for Mu2e for experimenting with AI agents.
我的团队参与了创世任务，因此我们为 Mu2e 提供了资金来试验人工智能代理。
You could say we’re on the bleeding edge; we’re doing all these things.
你可以说我们正处于前沿；我们正在做所有这些事情。
So I don’t want to make it seem as if in terms of physics research, we’re Luddites.
所以我不想让人觉得在物理研究方面我们是勒德分子。
I would say we’re the opposite.
我想说我们是相反的。
We’re trying to push as much as we can.
我们正在尽力推动。
If I were a postdoc, I think my use of this would be massaging the data, writing the foundational first version of the code.
如果我是一名博士后，我认为我对此的使用将是整理数据，编写代码的基础第一个版本。
But because I’m not in a position to use it in that way, those LLM prompts are not solving my problems right now.
但因为我无法以这种方式使用它，所以那些 LLM 提示现在并不能解决我的问题。
In my personal life, I have not opened up the prompt.
在我的个人生活中，我还没有打开过提示。
An LLM is not writing my emails; it’s not planning my vacations.
法学硕士不会写我的电子邮件；它没有计划我的假期。
Why are some emails difficult to write?
为什么有些电子邮件很难写？
Because I’m navigating something that’s tricky, that I need to figure out.
因为我正在处理一些棘手的事情，我需要弄清楚。
So having a large language model write it is me ignoring the root of the challenge that I am trying to solve.
因此，编写大型语言模型是我忽略了我试图解决的挑战的根源。
So I don’t find that a time-saver.
所以我认为这并不能节省时间。
The other thing is that I co-wrote a book on physics and dance with a colleague.
另一件事是我和一位同事共同写了一本关于物理和舞蹈的书。
The fact that people can ask an LLM a physics and dance question, and that it can be answered with our ideas, without any engagement with us, it means that we’re not going to get those emails from people who came across something in our book and want to have a conversation.
事实上，人们可以向法学硕士提出物理和舞蹈问题，并且可以用我们的想法来回答，而无需与我们进行任何接触，这意味着我们不会收到那些在我们书中看到某些内容并想要进行对话的人发来的电子邮件。
And that’s a conversation where I can learn, too.
这也是我可以学习的对话。
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获取发送到您的电子邮件收件箱的最重要新闻的摘要
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《Quanta》杂志对评论进行审核，以促进知情、实质性、文明的对话。
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辱骂、亵渎、自我推销、误导、语无伦次或偏离主题的评论将被拒绝。
Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (New York time) and can only accept comments written in English.
版主在正常工作时间（纽约时间）有工作人员，并且只能接受英文评论。