In the coming decade, the search for the Higgs boson, and for new particles representing physics beyond the Standard Model, will be carried out by colliding protons at the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. A collision of two protons, each of which is made out of quarks and gluons, is inherently messy. Feynman likened it to smashing two Swiss watches together to figure out how they work.
In recent decades, we have learned better how the Swiss watches work, using the theory of quark-gluon interactions, quantum chromodynamics. Armed with this knowledge, we can better predict the results of collisions at the Tevatron and the LHC, to see whether the Standard Model holds up or fails, or whether new particles are in the data. But a major bottleneck is simply in adding up Feynman diagrams, for which the rules are well known, yet there can be thousands of extremely complicated
diagrams. In fact, the sum of all diagrams is often much simpler than the typical one, suggesting hidden symmetries and better ways to compute. In the past two years, spinoffs from a new theory, "twistor string theory", have led to very efficient alternatives to Feynman diagrams for making such
predictions, as I will explain.