“The physics of these highly degenerate scattering processes has been something I’ve been curious about since I first ran into them about fifteen years ago, so it is exciting to see the strikingly simple expressions in this paper.
It happens frequently in this part of physics that expressions for some physical observables, calculated using textbook methods, look terribly complicated, but turn out to be very simple. This is important because often simple formulas send us on a journey towards uncovering and understanding deep new structures, opening up new worlds of ideas where, amongst other things, the simplicity seen in the starting point is made obvious.
To me, “finding a simple formula” has always been fiddly, and also something that I have long felt might be automatable by computers. It looks like across a number of domains we are beginning to see this happen; the example in this paper seems especially well-suited to exploit the power of modern AI tools. I am looking forward to seeing this trend continue towards a general purpose “simple formula pattern recognition” tool in the near future.”
—Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Study, specializing in theoretical high-energy physics