3 ms·

Wasn't Einstein's discoveries based on things humanity had already done? AIs do things no human has done before millions of times a day.

• nathan_compton 3mo ago
  Einstein's discoveries were based (to a large degree) on negating very specific parts of scientific orthodoxy and then taking the steps forward to carefully derive results with those rejections in place. LLMs are aggressively trained to reproduce facts and consequently struggle to reject orthodoxy. There isn't any reason they can't, in principal, make big new discoveries just by getting lucky, which is sort of also how humans do it, but its ok to acknowledge that current AIs aren't so good at certain things.
  • onraglanroad 3mo ago
    I was under the impression that it was more accepting the othodoxy of Galilean/Newtonian relativety and joining it up with Maxwell's discovery about electromagnetism. So if the speed of propogation of EM waves is the same no matter your frame of reference (along with all the rest of physics) then the speed of light can't be relative (a conclusion that was aided by the Michaelson-Morley experiment) and what are the logical consequences of that. If I'm incorrect in my understanding I'd appreciate any correction.
    • nathan_compton 3mo ago
      Well, sure, but if you want to accept those things you have to revoke the idea that distances and times are observer independent quantities. Even physicists fail to understand this after years of studying relativity. It is very difficult to really understand that relativity says: distances and durations that you measure in your frame of reference are not physically meaningful quantities.