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>> Specifically, I focused on the equivalence principle—a key axiom that Einstein formulated through thought experiments grounded in his physical intuition.

It's weird because the equivalence principle is very unintuitive. Aristotle's Mechanics does not have it. It took almost two thousand years to discover inertia that is the most simple version of the equivalence principle. Einstein understood the idea of the the equivalence principle because he had a physics degree, not because he feel that in real life.

Moreover, if you ever have to study or teach Quantum Mechanics, physical intuition gets in the way. A lot of properties contradict the physical intuition but after a while you get use to them. If we continue with Einstein, the photoelectric effect does not aperar in real life.

by glitchc6 hours ago|

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> If we continue with Einstein, the photoelectric effect does not aperar in real life.

Of course it does. How do you think your phone camera works?

by gus_massa52 minutes ago|

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But he didn't have one :) I guess unless you use the raw images, I think the cameras fix a lot of the noise caused by the Poisson distribution. I imagine a movie where Einstein get bored in the patent office and decide to open a photography shop, perhaps with very grainy underexposed photography is possible to notice the quantization of photons, and then he gets a Nobel prize.

Another bad idea for a movie is a watermillpunk universe, where during a practice on a hot day the best ever curling player discover inercia.

by CyLith7 hours ago|

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That’s funny, when I first learned about the equivalence principle, my first thought was “of course!” I have always found it to be very intuitive. The great leap is being able to frame it that way.

by kurthr6 hours ago|

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I worked on the early iPod scroll wheel, before there were advertisements for it and it was in common use. I found the UI interaction odd and unintuitive, particularly the "menu" button and the dead end you hit when "playing". Of course by the time the demonstrator ads came out and everyone was talking about how easy it was use, I'd already spent 10s of hours on it, and it WAS second nature. Being first and embedded in the culture of the time has huge UI advantages.

(Note that the HP Chipmunk 9836 also had a scroll selector wheel in 84)

Most people are UI bigots. Once they get used to a first something, they expect everything to work that way and hate learning anew. They get stuck on keyboards, mice, trackpoint nubs, trackpads, trackballs, scroll wheels, or touchscreens and refuse to move on. Of course there are 'objective' performance tests for each including Fitt's test of accuracy and latency, as well as, cognitive load. I guess once you have a hammer, every screw looks like a nail.

So I'd be a bit careful with the "of course!". It may well be obvious only because that is the first mental model you latch onto.

by throwaway634678 hours ago|

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I mean Einstein had help, he was networked with the best scientific minds of the planet and his discoveries were grounded in experimental results that contradicted existing theories (at least for specialized relativity), and without Riemann’s work he wouldn’t have been able to formulate his theory either. So not sure if AI couldn’t do that if you kept feeding it with new research results and let it correspond with top human scientists. Einstein was a genius but I don’t think his thought process is beyond what an LLM could simulate. And again this is probably the most impressive scientific achievement in theoretical physics in the 20. century so maybe it’s hanging the bar a bit high for LLMs.

by wildfireday28 hours ago|

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Moreover anyone glomming onto this paper for goal-post-shifting “AI can never” should:

1. Read the last sentence of the abstract, and

2. Reflect that frontier reasoning agents already increasingly integrate multimodal models.

by emp173448 hours ago|

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The worst thing about the AI boom is how tech bros feel comfortable abusing the goalpost fallacy. So annoying.

by wildfireday27 hours ago|

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If your glib comment is referring to me as a techbro and doing the annoying worst thing, then maybe you should explain how I am comfortably abusing the goalpost fallacy given the explosion of agentic AI capability.

I simply point out here, that fully accepting the paper’s premise, the paper’s conclusion isn’t limiting on frontier AI reasoning agents. The paper posits the necessity of multimodal world models and the limitations of LLMs. Frontier agents aren’t simply LLMs and do increasingly integrate increasingly capable multimodal models.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."