Comment by JimmyBuckets
6 hours ago
Dirac comments that he thinks a potential path to the discovery of new physics is to start with a mathematical domain and work outwards from there, guided by mathematical beauty. This is what I took OP's comment to be about - of course setting aside questions on an LLM's ability to recognize beauty
Superstring theory has been based on the idea of mathematical beauty, but it's run into serious complications when it comes to empirical results. Science is empirical first and foremost, because we need to verify that theories actually predict the universe we live in by testing them.
I don't know how LLMs would help sorting through the 10^500 possible universes when it comes to superstrings. You need to be able to run experiments or obtain observations.
Actually there are people attempting to find new math via biological entities. Cells and such. The interesting thing here is it is easily falsifiable even though working at these scales is still insanely hard.
Take the golden rule for example. It's a simple algorithm that shows up everywhere in nature. It represents the least amount of energy needed to assemble all kinds of structures. The gist here is nature finds these algorithms via evolution over billions of years and quadrillions of individual life experiments. We see life finding simple algorithms and platonic maths, how complex of algorithms has it found?
You no longer have to do an impossible number of experiments, instead you have to tease apart gene expressions to turn them on and off. Now, that is still a monumental task, but it's still doable in a reasonable amount of time.
Added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot
Individual cells like this can perform all kind of higher order operations that would appear to be intelligent actors.