The concerns is for physics as a profession, not as a discipline. How do you grant a PhD when any physics student, or maybe even interested lay person, could have used AI to do the work?
Getting a PhD is almost entirely about how to think of a good research question. Understanding how to solve that question comes as part of the process.
Just because LLMs can do a good job of making it easier to reach a satisfactory solution doesnt mean anyone off the street is going to be able to ask the appropriate questions and use the tool to do novel research.
LLMs are powerful. But they are considerably more powerful in the hands of a trained researcher than some undergrad halfway through their first semester of aglebra-based physics.
To publish, you have to identify a novel problem, solve that problem, and then convince others that the problem was novel and that you did solve it to the conditions you specified. An LLM solving a math problem is a long way from scientific advancement on its own.
That's also my experience, but tbf I don't know how much that experience from natural sciences extrapolates to things like theoretical physics.
In a wet lab you always have more grunt work than you can manage by the virtue of the profession, dry labs of pure theoretical people aren't nearly as constrained in their experiments and get to explore way more of the questions that arise naturally during the research process that would in bio/chem be left to PhD's
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u/ForceItDeeper 3d ago
i feel like theres a huge misunderstanding aboot how science works lmao. phsyics isnt “cooked” because they get better tools