“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Thus opens A Tale of Two Cities, a story that uses the French Revolution as a mirror to the Victorian society, which was torn by extreme inequality and political unrest.

The lines of Charles Dickens come to mind as I turn the last page on physicist and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek’s book The Lightness of Being and put it back on its shelf, where it happened to be placed next to Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics.

The two books couldn’t be more different in tone. Both came out in the early 2000s, just as the Large Hadron Collider was about to come online – and they tell very different tales of what direction science was about to take. Where Wilczek is full of hope, like a child before Christmas, Smolin is the prophet calling out from the wilderness.

I realise I’m with Wilczek every day of the week. Like him, I’m sold on the idea that science has a point – that our understanding of the universe improves over time. We both read the world through a deeply teleological lens.

In other words, we both believe that the universe — or at least our understanding of it — is going somewhere. That science isn’t just a toolbox for prediction, but a truth-seeking endeavour, a pilgrimage of sorts.

To use another big word, Frank and I had both fallen for the allure of an eschatological view — one in which knowledge has an endpoint.

That realisation forced me to confront something deeper: not just that I’d picked the wrong side in a scientific bet, but that I’d misunderstood the terms. Because in hindsight there’s no denying that Smolin’s austere pessimism has withstood the test of time far better than Wilczek’s starry-eyed optimism.

I feel this poses a question of almost existential dimensions, given that I’ve long turned to physics for the same reason others seek comfort in, say, romantic comedies. It’s not the exactness of thinking – I tend to skip past equations anyway – it’s the unshakeable belief that everything is going to be fine eventually, at least within the confines of this particular narrative bubble.

To see why the tension between Wilczek and Smolin matters, one has to trace a much older philosophical fault line — a divide over what science is for, and how it ought to move forward.

Wilczek is a Platonist at heart. He believes in underlying harmony, mathematical elegance, and the ultimate convergence of theory and reality. His writing hums with the idea that beauty is a guide to truth.

Smolin, by contrast, takes direct aim at the tendency of the physics community to cluster around ideas that are mathematically compelling but empirically barren. He wants to bring physics back to its roots, to privilege testability over beauty.

Their disagreement is not only about what is true, but about whether the deep structure of reality is simple, symmetric, and elegant — or messy, asymmetric, and stubbornly resistant to unification.

In a sense, it’s a battle between hope and suspicion. Wilczek’s hope that the universe is written in a beautiful script we’re gradually decoding; Smolin’s suspicion that we’ve mistaken the handwriting of our models for the signature of nature.

Their two books came out at a time when the scientific community leant heavily in favour of Wilczek. The multi-decade, multi-billion effort to get the LHC built was seen as the grand finale of a long journey, from the Cold War era to the peak of early-2000s scientific optimism.

Now, if you know one thing about the LHC, it’s likely that the much-anticipated Higgs boson was discovered deep in the guts of its machinery — a moment that led to the 2013 Nobel Prize for François Englert and Peter Higgs, half a century after their theory was first proposed. It was a triumph, to be sure. The Higgs was the final missing piece of the Standard Model, and its discovery confirmed one of the most daring predictions in modern physics.

But from a scientific point of view, it was almost mundane. The Higgs had been predicted for decades and was already priced into the Standard Model. Finding it was more confirmation than revelation. It was never supposed to be the point of the LHC — just the opening chord of a much grander concert. In the words of the late Stephen Hawking, scientists from all over the world had prepared to “Know the mind of God.”

In less poetic terms, they were expecting a wave of new empirical findings that would confirm a broader, unifying theory known as supersymmetry — or SUSY. It promised to fill in the gaps of the Standard Model and pave the way toward a true theory of everything.

The idea that nature would continue to reward the pursuit of symmetry and unification had decades of precedent – Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism, Einstein’s synthesis of space and time, electroweak theory’s triumph. The pattern was clear: follow the maths and nature complies.

At its core, SUSY proposes that every known particle has a hidden partner — a superpartner — with different spin. Bosons (particles that carry forces) would be paired with fermions (particles that make up matter), and vice versa. For every photon, a photino. For every quark, a squark. The maths works out beautifully — and solves several nagging theoretical problems in one stroke.

First, it offered a solution to the hierarchy problem — the question of why the Higgs boson is so light when quantum corrections should make it astronomically heavy. SUSY introduces new particles that neatly cancel out those destabilising corrections, restoring balance.

Second, it opened a path toward Grand Unification. The Standard Model is built from three disparate forces — electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force — each with its own coupling strength and mathematical machinery. SUSY reshapes the running of those coupling constants so that they converge at a single energy scale: the breathtaking suggestion that all forces might be different faces of a single, underlying force.

Third, SUSY provided a ready-made dark matter candidate. The lightest superpartner — stable, massive, and weakly interacting — ticked every box for the mysterious substance making up most of the universe’s mass.

Last but not least, supersymmetry provided the mathematical backbone of string theory.

SUSY wasn’t just a patch or an add-on. It was a principled extension of everything that had come before. If you took seriously the idea that the Standard Model was incomplete — if you believed in beauty, symmetry, and unification — then SUSY was the most coherent and compelling answer on the table.

Which is why, when the LHC switched on, physicists didn’t just hope for supersymmetry — they fully expected it.

Its absence hit hard.

When run after run of LHC data came back empty — no squarks, no gluinos, no neutralinos — it broke the hearts of an entire generation of scientists.

The LHC’s failure to reveal supersymmetry shook a worldview in which physics was seen as a steady progression toward deeper unification and underlying order. For decades, theorists had worked from the assumption that the universe was fundamentally rational, elegant, and ultimately describable through mathematics. Supersymmetry was expected to be the next major step in that direction. Its non-appearance left us with a Standard Model that works absurdly well but explains almost nothing. Why three generations of matter? Why those particular masses and mixings? Why is the cosmological constant so small? We got our Higgs, but we didn’t get our answer.

As disappointing as this was for scientists, the deeper impact may lie beyond the scientific community. Most people may not know that the LHC fell short of many of its promises — but that failure has nonetheless seeped into the zeitgeist. Big science once played the role of the adults in the room — physicists might argue over details, but the field as a whole kept moving forward. That steady progress acted as a quiet reassurance that, even if the rest of society was mired in conflict, reason would ultimately prevail. That the arc of history, though long, would bend — not just toward justice but toward understanding.

This, I suspect, is why the original Matrix film made such a splash. It tapped into a collective subconscious primed to the idea that there was such a thing as a red pill, and that discovering the underlying substrate of reality wouldn’t just be possible, but imminent. It was, to circle back to that big word, a deeply eschatological story.

As such, it felt like no coincidence that the film landed in the final year of the old millennium, catching a cultural moment when digital technology, theoretical physics, and metaphysical yearning were all converging. The internet felt magical, quantum theory was charged with meaning, and the LHC was on its way. The end was near – we were close to cracking the code behind the world, and it would be glorious.

Against that backdrop, the LHC’s failure to deliver on its grander promises was a monumental non-event.

In truth, the writing had been on the wall for decades. The cracks were already showing with the collapse of SU(5) — the first Grand Unified Theory to gain serious traction in the 1970s. It promised to unify the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces under a single symmetry group, and for a time, it looked like the next logical step. It was exceedingly elegant, but failed the test of experimental validation.

This was exactly the pattern Lee Smolin had been warning about. He traces his own growing unease with the field’s trajectory back to those early disappointments — moments when theory soared ahead of evidence, and no one seemed willing to call the emperor naked.

For Smolin, SU(5)’s failure wasn’t an isolated misstep, but the start of a deeper trend: the field’s increasing detachment from empirical grounding, and its growing reliance on mathematical elegance as a substitute for testable truth.

There’s a moving part in his book, where he’s describing an encounter with Edward Farhi, an old friend who had quit science:

Eddie had made important contributions to particle theory but now works mostly in the rapidly evolving field of quantum computers. I asked him why, and he said that in quantum computing, unlike particle physics, we know what the principles are, we can work out the implications, and we can do experiments to test the predictions we make.

He and I found ourselves trying to pinpoint when particle physics had ceased to be the fast-moving field that had excited us in graduate school. We both concluded that the turning point was the discovery that protons don’t decay within the time predicted by the SU(5) grand unified theory. “I would have bet my life—well, maybe not my life, but you know what I mean—that protons would decay,” was how he put it. “SU(5) was such a beautiful theory, everything fit into it perfectly – then it turned out not to be true.”

Indeed, it would be hard to underestimate the implications of this negative result. SU(5) is the most elegant way imaginable of unifying quarks with leptons, and it leads to a codification of the properties of the standard model in simple terms. Even after twenty-five years, I still find it stunning that SU(5) doesn’t work.

The failure of the first grand unified theories gave rise to a crisis in science that continues to this day. Before the 1970s theory and experiment had developed hand in hand. New ideas were tested within a few years, ten at most. Each decade from the 1780’s to the 1970’s saw a major advance in our knowledge of the foundations of physics, and in each advance, theory complemented experiment, but since the end of the 1970’s there has not been a single genuine breakthrough in our understanding of elementary particle physics.

Reading that passage, I’m struck by the thought that if The Matrix captured the dominant cultural mood at the turn of the millennium, then Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem might reflect something closer to the atmosphere we’re in now.

Liu’s story centres on aliens trying to break humanity’s spirit — not with weapons, but with doubt. And their method is chillingly precise: by sabotaging our particle accelerators, they create the illusion that nature itself is fundamentally unknowable, that our physical theories no longer align with reality.

In Liu’s world, this act of epistemic subversion is enough to unravel scientific progress. Physicists lose faith. Research stalls. The dream of understanding collapses under the weight of confusion and despair.

It’s fiction, of course, but the resonance is hard to ignore. There’s no alien force distorting our data — but the feeling isn’t so different. Physicists chase ever more elaborate frameworks — string theory, multiverses, higher dimensions — with little hope of empirical validation. Slowly, the old confidence — that the universe is ultimately knowable, that truth is just one breakthrough away — begins to erode.

Maybe what’s slipping through our fingers isn’t any particular theory, but the promise that the whole thing could ever be finished. We grew up on the myth that knowledge has a horizon, where the equations settle and the last unknown yields to light. It’s an intoxicating thought — that the story has an ending, and that we might be the ones to turn the final page. But perhaps that was always a kind of narrative vanity. The wish for a final theory is also the wish for a world sized to our expectations, a universe kind enough to resolve itself before the curtain falls. In reality, we may be living in something more like open water: shifting, boundaryless. A physics that moves under our feet not because it’s fickle but because it’s deeper than finite intelligence can map.

Perhaps the end of eschatology isn’t the end of meaning in physics — merely the end of a comforting story we told ourselves. What lies beyond might not be closure but a more mature wonder.