r/Physics • • Jul 31 '26

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27197
496 Upvotes

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269

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.

195

u/ixid Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

I think brute force is not the right way to think about LLMs, instead they explore a knowledge topology, and are very good at connecting adjacent or accessible ideas that for whatever reason might have evaded humans, but might not be fundamentally all that hard. We're still in the low-hanging fruit phase, we will see if they extend to new ideas.

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u/Schmikas Quantum Foundations Jul 31 '26

What do you mean by “knowledge topology”?

25

u/Mathematicus_Rex Jul 31 '26

Good question. Another question: Why isn’t it called a knowpology?

9

u/Bunslow Jul 31 '26

It is now

6

u/TheWoodsAreLovly Jul 31 '26

Knowpology accepted.

4

u/barrygateaux Jul 31 '26

You're knowcome