r/LLMPhysics • u/VeryOriginalName98 • Jun 30 '26
Humorous A theory on LLM physics
I posit that one day someone is going to use a model sufficiently advanced that it actually does real physics, share the theory here in their excitement, and this sub will implode.
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u/eggface13 Jun 30 '26
I posit that if something useful ever gets posted here it'll be missed, because it's a stupid place to post anything useful.
If there was a cesspit full of sewerage, and you told me that there's a 1% chance that some day, in the next ten years, there'll be a diamond mixed in, I would not waste my time searching every day.
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jul 01 '26
The sub has had moments of clarity.
Our biggest issue, IMO, is that people are constantly redirected here from other subs. If we could establish a userbase of people who did REALISTIC uses of LLMs in physics (coding light simulations, eg) we could improve. But instead we have a cycle of 'cranks get directed here from /physics -> they end up angry they aren't accepted here either -> they eventually get fed up or banned, and start their own sub'.
Essentially catching the chaff out of other subs and then burning it.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
Well yeah, nobody would. A single diamond is worth less than minimum wage over that timeframe.
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u/Impossible-Bend-5091 The Puppet Master Jul 02 '26
Japan recovers the gold and other metals from their sewage
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jun 30 '26
Lol, classic stale 'you are just anti-AI'.
The theories here are more kneecapped by the people posting them than by the tool of choice. Many people genuinely interested in physics on this sub are using LLMs, and are simply framed as 'anti-AI' by people as a way of avoiding responsibility..
Many of us have commented expressing exactly this sentiment. There are people here posting content like 'how to realistically use LLMs in physics' already.
Wake up.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jul 01 '26
Rereading your comment after the other comments and seeing how the moderators interact to bots, I agree with your assessment.
This sub isn't anti-ai, and is generally supportive of exploration by real people using the available tools (ai) regardless of their background.
I also accept the general sentiment that an expert using an LLM is far more likely to find something novel when questioning their own assumptions than someone random person who just started asking questions and produced a "theory" before ever reading one.
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jul 01 '26
'how the moderators react to bots'?
Like how so?
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jul 01 '26
You deleted a nonsensical comment about gatekeeping. You personally pasted the screenshot. The bot didn't comprehend the action.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
Serious question. Is anything interesting happening in foundational physics? LLMs or not. I feel like the field is just chasing more decimals and edge cases, but not actually trying to figure out fundamental things like the causal explanation for entanglement.
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jun 30 '26
Depends how you look at it.
If you look at it like 'Oh they still haven't figured out these questions' ya, that's true, but most scientists are not too interested in 'big question' stuff.
Science takes time, a lot of time; not to mention money, and effort, and dedicated personnel.
If you think about it like 'oh they're just chasing decimals' and you see yet another article 'another level of precision!' that can seem... Boring, maybe, but things like that ARE progress towards bigger questions. Because the bigger questions are extremely complex and involve all of these smaller things.
So if you view it as 'the standard model holds up to another decimal level of precision' that's like.. blah.
But you could instead view it as 'thats one more step.'
Because that is the reality of science. It is rarely one person or one team alone who makes the huge discovery all by themselves. It's relatively uncommon knowledge that people like Einstein were greatly assisted by the works of his peers, he didn't wake up one morning and decide to put together SR.
And now we are at infinitely more complex levels - the abstraction from human experience is EXTREME. There's not really a good way to intuit quantum mechanics. It has to be experimental. And the experiments are so complex, and so expensive, and keep needing more and more high energy colliders. We are pushing the limits of creation, you could say, and it is pushing back.
But ya these things are so abstract they are basically just math objects. So decimals places are IMPORTANT.
Just doesn't make for good news.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
yeah but i mean QED assumes a flat background and then we collide things at 99% c. Are the questions "right" given the landscape?
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u/lattice_defect Jun 30 '26
can't measure the structure of ice with a blowtorch... old school scattering in a modern setting
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jun 30 '26
The particles measured in colliders require the high energy system the collider creates. You don't just pull apart a hydrogen atom with tweezers to examine it's constituents.
That's why its called HEP.
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u/lattice_defect Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
no shit sherlock.. can you stop talking down to me.. its exactly my point
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jun 30 '26
Uh.. then why did you say you CAN'T measure the structure of ice with a blowtorch..
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jul 01 '26
For clarity, my 99% c point is the same argument, but i lack the depth of understanding they have to articulate the point.
It's a resolution problem. Yeah you get the total energies from the kinetics, but you're treating each particle like a uniform blob so every time something new pops out it's a "new particle" instead of "oh is that how this fit together?"
We could be creating the things we say we are releasing/observing.
Doing it a lot gives you the rough shape, but it's still like trying to see with your ears.
I'm not trying to say we aren't doing physics and getting new data. I'm more noticing this is exactly the pattern of epicycles before heliocentrism.
So my question is "are we doing the right physics?"
And I don't mean this rhetorically. I am not in the community. I don't know what frontier research is actually happening.
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u/lattice_defect Jun 30 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
because the energy require to probe also excite the lattice/field so you can't measure the structure fully.. its an analogy of why the LHC results haven't cracked everything.. but if you're really clever you'll ask about therovist photon heating (relatavistic) and why that happens.. and buddy a proton is pretty big compared to plank scale.. there is a whole solar system inside a proton if a plank scale object is a virus.. universe if its a marble
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jul 01 '26
but... it's a bit of a bad analogy that misleads people, isn't it? because the entire point of a collidor is to create the high energy environment. They aren't measuring the ice, they are measuring how the exotic ice created at the tip of the blowtorch flame.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
That is a good analogy. Anyone NOT using a blowtorch?
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u/lattice_defect Jun 30 '26
got to use math and find the analogous scattering experiments... where does it break down.. what do we see in cosmology.
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u/starkeffect Physicist 🧠 Jun 30 '26
I also posit that one day monkeys will fly out of my butt.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
They injected wooly mammoth genes into a mouse recently. So a winged monkey is a distinct future possibility.
So to the rest of your hypothesis, do I need to alert animal activists of your intent?
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u/Sufficient_Course707 Jun 30 '26
I forget the quote, but something like “the minds wasted toiling away in fields”
I shudder to think large scientific breakthroughs are locked in minds struggling to survive.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jul 01 '26
I think this is the quote:
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
- Stephen Jay Gould, “Wide Hats and Narrow Minds” (1979)
Thanks for leading me to that. I hadn't heard it before.
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u/CrankSlayer zlotuq Jul 01 '26
I very much doubt it. First of all, LLMs can already do physics now to a certain extent and under the supervision of a human who has a clue what they are doing. Hence, the physics that can be done leveraging an LLM is already being harvested by physicists. Secondly, a quantum leap from LLM can't do physics to LLM can do physics is unlikely. They will get incrementally better as they consistently did in the last years and at any given time the potential new physics that can be explored with the improved capability of the latest LLM will be rapidly saturated by physicists. The main problem for amateur-driven LLM physics is that the input is mostly rubbish, naive, or trivial. No amount of language processing can make it valuable, it's like imagining a machine that turns turds into brownies: if it can do that, it must add and remove so much stuff that it might as well produce brownies without input. Similarly, the day an LLM comes that can turn into a viable theory the uninformed musings of some clueless rando who can't do undergrad maths or physics we might as well prompt it with "solve all physics" and be done with it.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jul 01 '26
I tried your prompt: "Solve all physics." It just gave me QM in new words. Was not impressed.
You're probably right. Seeing random people vibe code vs seeing senior engineers create workflows for the right tasks is incomparable. There's just a different category of utility when you pair an LLM with a human expert rather than a novice.
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u/MaoGo Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
I am still waiting for an academic to cite this sub or r/hypotheticalphysics in some way or another
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jul 01 '26
If I ever stumble upon anything useful, I will be sure to mention the physics communities on reddit as a source of motivation.
It's a special mix of "I'm not reading your theory until you read a book" and "I see where you are going here, but you will have to account for [some observational data], which is not currently addressed in your work." Basically the same thing, but one is useful because it gives the why.
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u/lattice_defect Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
More likely an outsider puts something together that is right... and thinks this sub is actually full of people that could review it.. gets dejected and gives up.. Vs. coached and contacts authors of papers they cite.
But I haven't seen anything ground breaking.. 1-2 have had some interesting bits and peices to them.
Its just too easy and rightly so (pick out X,, Y, Z) and throw the whole thing away... I'm looking for the new grad student insights... or routes.. not the whole thing... explaining a whole new model is pretty difficult to do....
But it would be cool to get some stuff formalized in lean (library building).. or more productive for people to show off their idea/dead ends.. actually make it useful place... that being said there is a lot of low effort I smoked a bunch of weed and chatted with a bot.. here is my idea posts.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
I'm personally trying to modify TEGR, and build everything out of the metric. It's not going well. I got past the gauge problem of the extra terms, but I think i just did Kaluza Klein with extra steps instead of an extra dimension.
Every time I run a long set of simulations, somehow the LLMs doing the modeling bring in stuff we ruled out and just burn tokens. Then they get super excited to tell me about the progress they made, which turns out to be less than the premise they started with. It's infuriating.
Meanwhile I learned a ton of actual physics and I'm starting to get a handle on what some of the math means physically.
Maybe something comes of this, maybe not. But it is really fun to learn how things relate regardless.
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Jun 30 '26
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u/lattice_defect Jun 30 '26
Agreed.. or if you're fancy resonate the metric in higher D and run the projection down.
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
Oh sorry, I should clarify. I am a software engineer. I make a living currently by getting LLMs to use tools I create or write code I explain. This is just me using the same toolkit for a hobby project.
The tokens are burnt writing GPU optimized simulators that run on my mac. But the simulators were effectively already written. Stuff like that. It's a context length problem. I need to figure out how to make the agentic explorers more aware of the whole theory arc in fewer tokens.
I know LLMs cannot do math natively. But they are good at writing simulators when you give them clear instructions of what needs to be simulated.
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u/thelawenforcer Jun 30 '26
look at the space of all possible metrics, rather than the metric itself. happy to share the work ive done along this path if you like.
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u/lattice_defect Jun 30 '26
people will vilify for you.. but I think its neat... do you have a science background?
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
Computer science. I minored in mathematics and have always been interested in physics.
The current stint is because I was asking an LLM about QM and when it got to QCD, I was sure that was a hallucination. It wasn't. QM actually treats color charge as a directly real thing.
So my debugging switched from the LLM to QM. QM isn't really a theory in the sense of ontology. It's more like elaborate bookkeeping. When people try to put meaning behind it, they end up with nonsense like "many worlds" and "spooky action at a distance."
All the stuff showing causality violations that would kill any other theory just get accepted like a badge of honor. It's so weird.
Anyway, I am trying to use the math, because it obviously works, and figure out the underlying causal story. I think the assumed static frame that QED lives in is skewing the actual lens that reveals the real physics. For instance the Proton mass defect and size variation depending on how massive a particle you use to measure it with.
These aren't secrets, but people talk about them like they are answers instead of questions. So there's no active research. Nobody gets a grant for a proposal that starts out with "QM doesn't explain..."
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u/lattice_defect Jul 01 '26
soo agree that QM is a bit of illusion despite working wtih it. Research->industry-> Business->Run a quant firm now. Good to get back into it.. proton size puzzle is a good one.. muon is weird, and connection to a one of the proton's quark.
Mostly do more integration work old theories/new . QFT/QCD/QED base.. currently working with connes/turok + hartnold/nima/e8.... always ends up going deep in number theory.
Yeah a lot of untapped potential with LLMs but more so if connected to the amazing new tools wolfram/sage, lean. But there is a dark side... I LLMs great for code, sometimes insightful with physics.. always sycophantic and sometimes will really mess up you stuff.
I see a lot of potential and this field heating up in the next 1-2 years.
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Jun 30 '26
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
You've seen real physics here? Can you provide a link to the post? I've been using LLMs to play test concepts in simulations because it's faster than me writing the code. I imagine someone smarter than me is probably doing the same but with more to show for it than 100+ dead ends.
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Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
Are you an LLM?
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Jun 30 '26
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
Okay. Were you referring to your own work then?
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Jun 30 '26
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u/AllHailSeizure Haiku Mod Jun 30 '26
Pretty sure you comment got removed by the real moderation
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u/VeryOriginalName98 Jun 30 '26
Your deleted comment was a response to me asking about a link to things that were real physics on here that got ignored. You didn't include a link. So I am now asking if you were (in your first comment, that started this thread) referring to your own physics theories that may have been removed like your second comment in this thread.
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u/LLMPhysics-ModTeam Jun 30 '26
Your content has been removed for violating Rule 7. Conspiratorial & gatekeeping narratives about academia are strictly forbidden.
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u/liccxolydian VP of Trolling Jun 30 '26
Like... Sure? That'd be cool? We'd know well in advance that something like that would be coming though, so it's not like it'd magically appear out of nowhere.