How Artificial Intelligence Can Supercharge the Search for New Particles - Facts So Romantic

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine's Abstractions blog. Occasionally the machine may rattle reality enough to have a few of those collisions generate something that's never been seen before. But because these events are by their nature a surprise, physicists don't know exactly what to look for. They worry that in the process of winnowing their data from those billions of collisions to a more manageable number, they may be inadvertently deleting evidence for new physics. "We're always afraid we're throwing the baby away with the bathwater," said Kyle Cranmer, a particle physicist at New York University who works with the ATLAS experiment at CERN.