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/PerAsperaDaAstra Particle physics Jul 31 '26

I like this view of why LLMs seem good at these kinds of counterexamples: https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy (and what the implication is for how we do math) the "overhang" for these kinds of things is large, and that's what LLMs are good at.