As detailed in a paper posted to arXiv last week, however, Tailin Wu and Max Tegmark, two physicists from MIT, have made a major step in that direction with their "AI physicist".
The old Newtonian certainties were destroyed, but in their place physicists found both a better foundation for their field and a spectrum of exciting research problems.
In their bones, physicists feel it is the long-lost Higgs boson, but in science, feelings take second place to data.
Rick Gaitskell, LUX's chief scientist, reckons two decades of dark-matter hunting have covered about half the possibilities.A process of eliminationWhile astrophysicists attack the problem by looking outward, their particle-physicist brethren are looking inward.
Since the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) team announced their results, physicists around the world have published scores of online papers trying to explain the strange finding as either the result of a trivial mistake or evidence for new physics.
Prior to their work, physicists thought the showering particles were the problem, whereas the penetrating particles seemed to be understood.
But to their surprise, physicists also discovered steps that could only be explained by multiples of fractions of that charge: 1/3, 2/3, 2/5, and 3/7.
More than a century after Planck, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger had their insights, physicists have begun to take consciousness seriously again.
In order to test their models, physicists assume that the elements of these models correspond in some way to reality.
Even though black holes still have scientists scratching their heads, physicists are working together to gain a better understanding of the elusive objects.
