Hearing us talking about the Amplituhedron, the professor across the table chimed in.

“The problem with you amplitudes people, I never know what’s a conjecture and what’s proven. The Amplituhedron, is that still a conjecture?”

The Amplituhedron, indeed, is still a conjecture (although a pretty well-supported one at this point). After clearing that up, we got to talking about the role proofs play in theoretical physics.

The professor was worried that we weren’t being direct enough in stating which ideas in amplitudes had been proven. While I agreed that we should be clearer, one of his points stood out to me: he argued that one benefit of clearly labeling conjectures is that it motivates people to go back and prove things. That’s a good thing to do in general, to be sure that your conjecture is really true, but often it has an added benefit: even if you’re pretty sure your conjecture is true, proving it can show you why it’s true, leading to new and valuable insight.

There’s a long history of important physics only becoming clear when someone took the time to work out a proof. But in amplitudes right now, I don’t think our lack of proofs is leading to a lack of insight. That’s because the kinds of things we’d like to prove often require novel insight themselves.

It’s not clear what it would take to prove the Amplituhedron. Even if you’ve got a perfectly clear, mathematically nice definition for it, you’d still need to prove that it does what it’s supposed to do: that it really calculates scattering amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills. In order to do that, you’d need a very complete understanding of how those calculations work. You’d need to be able to see how known methods give rise to something like the Amplituhedron, or to find the Amplituhedron buried deep in the structure of the theory.

If you had that kind of insight? Then yeah, you could prove the Amplituhedron, and accomplish remarkable things along the way. But more than that, if you had that sort of insight, you would prove the Amplituhedron. Even if you didn’t know about the Amplituhedron to begin with, or weren’t sure whether or not it was a conjecture, once you had that kind of insight proving something like the Amplituhedron would be the inevitable next step. The signpost, “this is a conjecture” is helpful for other reasons, but it doesn’t change circumstances here: either you have what you need, or you don’t.

This contrasts with how progress works in other parts of physics, and how it has worked at other times. Sometimes, a field is moving so fast that conjectures get left by the wayside, even when they’re provable. You get situations where everyone busily assumes something is true and builds off it, and no-one takes the time to work out why. In that sort of field, it can be really valuable to clearly point out conjectures, so that someone gets motivated to work out the proof (and to hopefully discover something along the way).

I don’t think amplitudes is in that position though. It’s still worthwhile to signal our conjectures, to make clear what needs a proof and what doesn’t. But our big conjectures, like the Amplituhedron, aren’t the kind of thing someone can prove just by taking some time off and working on it. They require new, powerful insight. Because of that, our time is typically best served looking for that insight, finding novel examples and unusual perspectives that clear up what’s really going on. That’s a fair bit broader an activity than just working out a proof.