I think I see where you're coming from, but in every case where this has been hypothesized so far (e.g. soap bubbles a few years ago) it has been shown to be fa

I think I see where you're coming from, but in every case where this has been hypothesized so far (e.g. soap bubbles a few years ago) it has been shown to be false. Mostly, physical phenoma result in purely local minima/maxima -- which is generally useless for solving NP-complete problems. At least that's my intuition.