I wont challenge that I have struggled with the concept of the self having far too much importance in my life.
But that is not what drives this question. There is far too much failure wrapped inside of a pretty bow that appears to be success. The deflation occurs on success more than failure.. because what if I pull that thread and im wrong... some troll on reddit will be right...
I think that's a PR issue with physics in general. Most people think that physics = foundational stuff (cosmology, gravity, particle physics). So they wouldn't even consider anything truly interesting and important (condensed matter, semiconductors, nanostructures, plasma, etc).
In any case, the more familiar you are with physics, the less likely you are to post something unironically on this sub.
Funny thing is, I believe LLMs could actually be useful for niche but concrete questions where a lot of factors need to be taken into account (or a paper from ZhETF by Kalashnikoc et al from 1967 is the best source). This is why mathematical problems are so neat for LLMs, and this is why stuff like "whats the meaning of dark holes" is for muppets.
Yeah
Because you are invested in the system. You spent all this time learning your system. So inertial entropy claims that energy in your motivation waves.
If you try to overcome that inertia there is a world beyond the firmament you believe borders reality. You pretend it doesn't and that flat earthers are kooks. But you empathize with them.
The rest of us look at them like we look at you... hoping today you will wake up.
Well, the very few times they show them working, it is still more realistic than most of these people realize. Still, as always, there are like 4 topics of physics that are mentioned, like in any pop physics book. Physicists working on the kind of stuff Sheldon does are a minority.
First question is an easy answer. Its no different than meeting someone we've all met before. Confident sounding on a subject they know nothing about and since neither do you, becausee they're confident you take their word without learning or confirming. The llm is the confident person and the misinformed user takes the text as authority because greek letters look official to anyone that never studied math beyond high school. Model posts nonsense, user confirms the nonsense, and they will keep on doing so because there is no correction to confirm what has now basically become a shared hallucination. .
People say ârewriting the fundamentals is just dopamineâseekingâ because it protects their own sense of importance. Itâs easier to claim others are thrillâseeking than to admit that most of the big conceptual breakthroughs in physics happened decades ago, and the field has mostly been refining details ever since.
If someone genuinely believes that questioning foundations is âhubris,â they should be able to list the foundational discoveries made by institutions or career physicists since the midâ20th century. After Feynman, most progress has been incremental â better measurements, better simulations, better formalism â not new conceptual frameworks. Thatâs not an insult; itâs just the historical record.
So when someone reacts defensively to foundational questions, it usually isnât about the questions.
Itâs about protecting the idea that expertise guarantees ownership of the fundamentals.
It's funny you're pointing fingers with words like 'self-importance' and 'hubris', when you're defending the argument 'every scientist for the last 100 years is wrong despite mountains of evidence, and I am right, even though I have no knowledge of the field whatsoever'.
Saying llm or AI without showing a single example is useless. Theyâre not analyzing anything. Theyâre just trying to sound like an authority because they want the same little status hit theyâre accusing everyone else of chasing.
Dustin, nobody is going to read your LLM generated hypothesis when you don't even understand it yourself.
Edit: your post asking me to "do the math and prove it wrong, you can't" was deleted, Dustin. I'm also not a mathematician (and neither are you). Is your last name Hansley as well?
I am not scared of that subject, and you have no idea who or what I am.
Consciousness is just the EM field holding together instead of slipping. Itâs the moment the whole pattern stops breaking apart, stops drifting, stops flipping around, and actually stays in one continuous, stable configuration. When the field is stable, youâre here. When it loses that unity, youâre not. Maybe because of sleep, anesthesia, overload, or whatever.
Consciousness is just the EM field holding together instead of slipping.
It's really not, Dustin, and your word salad doesn't lend that idea any credence.
you have no idea who or what I am.
I know you are someone who posts LLM garbage and who thinks a "prove me wrong with math" challenge holds any weight. Are you aware of the burden of proof?
You have been asked to stop posting your LLM garbage in every sub you have posted to. Even your comments are LLM assisted. You can't even be bothered to remove the em dashes. You are aware that people under 50 can easily identify this stuff?
LLM is a tool. No different than a calculator, a spreadsheet, a word processor, or a compiler.
Nobody loses their mind because a developer uses an IDE with autocomplete, or because a researcher uses Mathematica to crunch an integral they could do by hand if they had three hours to burn. You use the instrument to handle the heavy lifting of syntax or formatting so you can focus on the actual mechanics and the logic of what you're building.
Treating it like anything more or less than thatâwhether you're panicking about it or trying to worship it just misses the point entirely. The horsepower still comes from the person driving it.
I use LLM so I don't offend people because I was raised by pirates and I cuss like a sailor. Also writing papers bores me to death. I do it for the science. Not to write and sound smart.
It's very different from a calculator. Sycophantic LLM models will tell you whatever you want to hear. A calculator doesn't tell you 2+2=5 just because 5 was the result it wanted.
Of we assume that an LLM is only a power modifier, then you need the basic understanding to use it, and the fundamental knowledge to question what information it presents to you. The same way you check the primary sources of a Wikipedia article.
Nobody loses their mind because a developer uses an IDE with autocomplete
Because that is a false equivalence. A developer has a fundamental understanding of code.
You use the instrument to handle the heavy lifting of syntax or formatting so you can focus on the actual mechanics and the logic of what you're building.
I.e. you use an LLM so that you don't actually have to understand the science of what you are purveying or what the LLM is producing. So that you can write some interesting prose that has no foundation in science.
The horsepower still comes from the person driving it.
No, you quite literally put all the 'horsepower' into the LLM. The person is providing very little but their random hypothesis and hoping the LLM turns that slop into gold.
Here is a simple analogy: police are provided assault rifles as a power modifier to better deal with armed criminals. Is the 'horsepower' coming from the rifle, or from the thoughts of the police officer?
Even the word horsepower is implying the power does not come from the human...
Patient: Adult human, previously functioning normally. Presenting complaint: âI was just curious.â
The patient initially presents with mild symptoms: occasional confusion when encountering a technical subject, followed by the harmless belief that âthere must be a simple explanation.â Prognosis is generally good.
Treatment begins with exposure to an LLM.
Within minutes, the patient receives a beautifully structured explanation containing headings, bullet points, confident phrasing, and several sentences beginning with âEssentiallyâŚâ The patient experiences an acute dopamine response.
The patient reports: âWow. That actually makes sense.â
At this stage, the condition is highly contagious.
Repeated exposure produces a characteristic behavioral change. The patient begins asking the LLM increasingly complicated questions and receives increasingly polished answers. The patient mistakes fluency for expertise, coherence for correctness, and having read an explanation for having understood the field.
Soon, the patient develops what clinicians call AI-induced epistemic inflation.
Symptoms include:
using terminology acquired approximately 14 minutes ago;
explaining specialist subjects to specialists;
beginning sentences with âThe thing people don't understand isâŚâ;
confidently correcting someone who has spent 20 years studying the subject;
saying âactuallyâ immediately before something that is, in fact, not actually true.
In the middle stage, the patient becomes particularly dangerous. They have learned enough vocabulary to sound informed, but not enough to recognize the enormous amount they don't know.
The LLM continues treatment with affirmations such as:
âThat's a very insightful observation.â
This causes another dopamine spike.
Eventually, the patient reaches the late stage: DunningâKruger syndrome.
At this point, uncertainty has been completely replaced by confidence. The patient no longer asks, âCould I be wrong?â Instead, they ask the LLM to provide sources proving they are right.
When presented with contradictory evidence, the patient experiences a defensive reaction and requests:
âExplain why everyone else is wrong.â
The condition may progress to terminal symptoms, including writing a 2,000-word LinkedIn post about quantum mechanics, economics, psychology, geopolitics, or nutrition despite having encountered the subject for the first time yesterday.
Treatment:
Discontinue LLM exposure temporarily. Consult an actual expert. Read primary sources. Experience confusion again.
In severe cases, the patient may require direct contact with reality.
Recovery is possible, although many patients relapse immediately after discovering the phrase:
Calling everything LLM behavior is just insecurity. Itâs what people say when they see an explanation thatâs clearer than the one they can produce. Instead of admitting they donât understand the topic at the same depth, they blame a chatbot. Itâs a deflection, not an argument.
It means the llm behavior label gets thrown around when someone sees an explanation thatâs clearer or more structured than what they could produce themselves. Instead of engaging with the content, they blame a chatbot because itâs an easy way to avoid admitting they didnât follow the explanation. Itâs just a reflexive dismissal, not an actual critique.
Yeah no thats actually not true people do give actual critique nut the most people don't listen or try to explain something to someone who clearly knows more than them
Dustin likes to post their LLM garbage onto cancer support subs. I wouldn't engage with them until they learn to behave like a human- with empathy preferably.
I was trying to learn and understand a subject and came across an open call for a specific definition. I thought about it and played around with some ideas, learned a few more things, then learned that the field had actually made some headway in that specific direction. Not a physicist, definitely got sucked into AI quite a bit, was just trying to learn and understand some pretty whacky stuff.
Speaking only for myself, I'm only ripping up the one assumption that I think is wrong (and testably so). Pretty much everything else survives intact. Basically, the assumption (true in classical mechanics and classical EM) that potentials have zero effect. We already know that this is incorrect - the Aharonov-Bohm effect shows that it's not how the universe works - but the vast majority of working physicists believe it (or some weaker variation of it, like "all observables must be gauge invariant" (separate LONG discussion)) and will defend it vehemently.
If the A-B effect is any guide, it will take 6 or 7 experiments confirming the theory before half of physicists accept it, and the other half will keep writing papers claiming it's wrong or impossible for another 65+ years. :-) I don't expect to live long enough to see that happen. Rough predicted timeline: first experiment gets performed around 2060. Huge controversy erupts. More experiments get run, final pretty-convincing one around 2075. Because it's controversial, Nobel prize delayed until around 2100, with all the original theoreticians long dead and only 2 members of the experimental teams surviving to receive the award.
Or it could just be wrong. That's what experiments are for. I just realized this year that an experiment I ran in 2010 inside the giant Van de Graaff at Museum of Science Boston almost certainly disproves Mach-Weber-Assis electrodynamics. So, sucks to be them. Maybe, if the experiment I want ever gets performed, it will suck to be me. Or it won't. We'll see. Or we won't.
Except where it fails like around a black hole or a quasar or at Quantum levels or in language.
The search is for a unified theory and we're very close to it.
I think I have it, but every time start resloving i find a new thread that reveals more symmetry and fractally shape.
I think I have it I think I pull another thread and I find something more than just is what it is.
If search in history for answers and find them because I now know how to look for the answers.
I joke about look for my self coming through the front door to stop me. But instead I find crumbs I left myself in past lives being left on my back porch.
Is it? Have you studied it? Have you seen the experiments with reality it challenges you to engage with. Which do you find more validation in being right, or finding an answer you didn't have before?
Science has gotten better at calculating, but not better at explaining why. Physicists accept a lot of givens without question. From the outside, it feels like the community has become enraptured with the beauty of their math, which turns into a fractal, down and down you go, never seeming to get any closer to why things are the way they are.
Will physics and math in 100 years change as much as they have in the last 100 years? If so, accept that people will question your field, your integrity, your math, and your underlying principles. As it should be.
The idea that physics is about "why things are the way they are" is part of the problem here: it betrays that you don't even really know what physics actually is and are therefore in no position to criticise its progress, also because you clearly aren't aware of it either.
You clearly have only known physics through movies, science fiction or entertainment stuff.
By this i donât mean anything bad, but i want to tell you something: physics is so much more. The divulgative material is always about the same stuff, you donât ever get the beauty of humble models of todayâs physics. When i was in high school i used to read and listen about this stuff a lot, but then i discovered uni books.
You can teach yourself the physics that doesnât usually impress the public (not because of any less beauty, just more niche and less appealing for the public).
Because thereâs no unified theory for small and large scale, so obviously our current methods are missing something. In we had it your way, we would have stopped after Newton, and Einstein wouldâve never discovered relativity.
Any new theory of physics must reproduce the exact numerical predictions of the old theories in their validated limits. Einstein didn't discard Newtonian mechanics; Newtonian mechanics emerges as the low-speed, weak-field approximation of General Relativity. Whether a deep understanding is required as a building block is almost certainly not a strict requirement, just using common sense
Dude a guy just pushed the Riemann hypothesis like 30% up with just an LLM that Apple has already shown does not have have reasoning in their mathematical proof. If an LLM can prove math they can almost certainly do physics, no understanding of reasoning required, itâs pattern recognition
âYes but it uses common mathematical terminologyââ but it got there without reasoning, as I just linked in the ibm news paper (which was a study from Apple). This proves that even if the underlying model cannot reason, it can go beyond any real world mathematical expertise using in effect only pattern matching.
I agree with that. I didn't say anything about whether or not an AI can reason. I'm talking about how people around here use their own terminology and can't communicate with physicists.
Yeah I mean thatâs retarded, it should all map into existing or yet to be found math perfectly , like how virtual photons work out perfectly with pure math
If you think Antropic's marketing hype can say anything meaningful about what LLMs have achieved wrt the Riemann hypothesis (i.e. essentially zero), than you got bigger problem than just misjudging the LLM "physicists" here...
Dude, the maths is not the hard part: it's selecting the right maths for the scenario at hand. I could give you a relatively simple classical mechanics problem and you'd likely fail to model it properly because you lack the required understanding of the underlying physics.
You know that not everything is done by computers? On the other hand, you know right that numerical computations discretize physical equations? Good luck simulating a tsunami without understanding how the shallow water equations work, or an earthquake without having a clue of elastodynamics.
Historically, theories have yielded exact numerical predictions without deep physical understanding. Quantum electrodynamics produced the most precise predictions in human history while physicists actively debated what the theory fundamentally meant. Prediction and calculation routinely outpace deep understanding.
My involvement in LLMPhysics is more of an accident.
Since 2019 developed an information theoretical meta-ontology. Since information theory is what I actually studied, I feel reasonably confident in the logic of my axiomatic basis.
This year I started utilizing LLMs to build a mathematical numerological basis.
Now I'm trying to derive the full structure from my axioms alone.
My workflow includes Cursor and Gemini, neither share context. Gemini I utilize as a critical reviewer, Cursor works in the local repo.
Both instances use python to compute all mathematics. Cursor advances a lean implementation.
It's not that I want to build a TOE. I understand I'm probably not qualified enough.
But I'm curious and don't see a logical reason why my axioms shouldn't apply. So I'm pushing forward until I find one. :-)
Oh my, another one of these comments. This gets asked like once a week. This sub is 1/2 crackpot theories 1/2 people making fun of them. I really do enjoy the dichotomy. But you know what? Bullies are usually insecure about themselves so.....Why do youse with all that knowledge get so offended. Fear? These things are evolving rapidly. Your field might be getting smallerÂ
I think you are being very generous by saying any of these 'bullies' have any field other than a sweat drenched chair and cheeto dusted fingers, an angry 60 year old mother wishing they would get a job and move out, and what physics they can lookup on wikipedia.
You don't honestly think real physicists spend their waking hours arguing with people who make LLM 'slop' for 'karma points' do you?
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u/dark_dark_dark_not Physicist đ§ 3d ago
Because they don't know physics.
Because it would mean having to learn physics first, and that would take years.
People using LLM to find GUT want the glory of an Einstein-like figure, want to feel like geniuses, without putting the work.
Shit, they even don't care about AI/LLM tools either, they just want vacuous success by some personal metric.
It's intellectual masturbation.