Scientific Series

Over the last half decade, the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have leapt from preschooler to graduate student and beyond. This talk reviews recent progress in teaching LLMs to do science and reasoning, and speculates as to what it will mean for the future of theoretical physics if these trends continue.

For decades, we have known that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible. This unseen component—dark matter—accounts for roughly 85% of all matter and plays a central role in shaping cosmic structure. Yet, despite decades of experimental effort and remarkable ingenuity, its fundamental nature remains unknown. Dark matter provides compelling evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model, motivating a broad landscape of candidates ranging from weakly interacting massive particles to ultralight axions. Astrophysical observations offer a complementary avenue to laboratory experiments for testing dark matter models across a broad range of masses and interaction strengths. In this talk, I will present novel observational strategies designed to uncover signatures of new physics and highlight the opportunities opened by current and next-generation observatories. In particular, I will demonstrate how modern astrophysical observatories can be repurposed as laboratories for fundamental physics, using JWST infrared observations to search for axion dark matter and radio observations of cosmic filaments to test WIMP scenarios.