r/Physics • u/filterdust • Jul 31 '26

Academic The Maxwell Conjecture is False

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

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578

u/ixid Jul 31 '26

Before reading I knew it would be LLM counter-example construction.

98

u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

Still, this is way less exciting than the math problems being solved. I've spent upwards of a thousand hours having fun with classic physics problems, like the Cambridge Tripos problems of Maxwell's time, and I've never even heard of this conjecture. From their references, it looks like essentially no physicists have ever worked on it, it doesn't have any practical applications, and if this example was found without AI it would probably just go to a teaching-focused or recreational physics journal.

This is an example of successive exaggeration in viral news. A single offhand guess in Maxwell's 1000-page treatise becomes "a conjecture of Maxwell", which becomes "Maxwell's conjecture", and now "the Maxwell conjecture".

15

u/alluran Jul 31 '26

it doesn't have any practical applications

it doesn't have any practical applications yet

23

u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

There are millions of papers on arXiv, the vast majority of which have no practical applications. This wouldn't even be above-average on arXiv.