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Comment by rustyhancock | Hacker News Reader

I think a very long time because part of our limit is experiment.

We need enough experimental results to explain to solve these theoretical mismatches and we don't and at present can't explore that frontier.

Once we have more results at that frontier we'd build a theory out from there that has two nearly independent limits for QFT and GR.

What we'd be asking if the AI is something that we can't expect a human to solve even with a lifetime of effort today.

It'll take something in par with Newton realising that the heavens and apples are under the same rules to do it. But at least Newton got to hold the apple and only had to imagine he could a star.

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The question is, if you trained an LLM on everything up until 1904, could it come up with E=MC² or not?

In 1900 Henri Poincaré wrote that radiation (light) has an effective mass given by E/c^2.

So it really isn't far fetched. What intrigues me more is if it was capable of it would our Victorian conservative minded scientists have RLHF it out of that kind of thing?

This assumes that what's holding back solving hard problems is designing experiments to get novel data. Einstein's though experiments were very productive despite not taking place in a lab.

Einstein and SR is an interesting case.

Nearly the entirety of the theory had already been laid out before Einstein.

Lorenz transforms contain the length contraction and local time, Poincaré had already written about E=mc^2 for radiation, he'd also set out the idea of relativity. All this before 1905.

Einstein's revolution was in turning that patchwork into a self contained theory with a couple postulates.

He had all the data he could want most of it from decades earlier.

We have approximately 0 experimental evidence at the GR/QFT boundary.

The best we have is Hawkings radiation something we currently can't possibly observe experimentally.

If we wanted to study the GR/QFT with a particle accelerator it would need to be the size of the Milky Way.

Again, this is all assuming that we have formulated the problem correctly. So much of the value of experiments in solving hard problems is not so much the results, but in how those results steer the formulation of a theory. It's hard to know how much evidence we might already have for resolving GR/QFT without the benefit of hindsight.

> I think a very long time because part of our limit is experiment.

Yes, maybe. But if you are smarter, you can think up better experiments that you can actually do. Or re-use data from earlier experiments in novel and clever ways.

this. could already be useful to narrow down the search space

What prevents us from giving this system access to other real systems that live in physical labs? I don't see much difference between parameterizing and executing a particle accelerator run and invoking some SQL against a provider. It's just JSON on the wire at some level.

Nothing, we can give it all the data we have and have it lead experiments.

But we can not yet experiment at the GR/QFT frontier.

To do so with a particle accelerator it would need to be the size of the milky way.

Even if the AI could suggest experiments to try, and tell us "check that out and get back to me with the results", that would be valuable.

Agreed. We have lots of theories like string theory, but until we can make an experiment to prove one way or another it remains a theory.

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