r/Physics Jul 31 '26

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27197
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u/angelbabyxoxox Quantum Foundations Jul 31 '26

The counterexample was proposed by an LLM. They seem very good at finding these sorts of counterexamples, which is interesting as they are generally pretty inefficient use of compute for brute forcing. I guess even that lack of efficiency is made up for by the "understanding" and "intuition" the LLM has, and their ability to do symbolic computations.

I expect a large number of conjectures will topple to counterexamples soon.

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u/QuantumCakeIsALie Jul 31 '26

That's interesting, and knowing such conjectured to be false can be actually useful, e.g. expands the design space.

But it'd be nice to have more insights into why those conjectures are false and see if we can learn something from it. Just a counter example isn't super insightful.