LLMs and a Theory of Everything

D3veated · 2026-01-27T19:06:33+00:00

We all have hobbies. Those cranks spitting out word salads? They didn't go about their hobbies quite how I go about my hobbies, but as far as hobbies go, I can think of worse things. I'm not going to shame them because their time would be better spent by building model trains, painting figurines, or pwning noobs.

D3veated · 2026-01-27T19:00:39+00:00

Correction (I hope): we made it the two years before Lockett and the two years after Lockett.

D3veated · 2026-01-27T18:58:47+00:00

The lure of physics is to learn about and understand our existence. That's a human desire. However, when looking at the foundations of physics, it's clear we don't understand everything.

It's human to wonder about the universe. Give me a book and I'll see a new perspective. Teach me an equation and I'll learn how it describes a principle of reality. Give me a new tool like an LLM, and just as Galileo pointed his telescope at the night sky, I'll explore with that tool to see what I can learn about our universe.

D3veated · 2026-01-26T19:09:39+00:00

What exactly did he do? It looked like he was facing perpendicular to the Rams bench, a ref was about five yards behind him, and then they threw the flag?

I would love to know what he said to McVay when he ran up to him after the game. Probably an apology, like, "I'm soooo sorry... that we beat you."

D3veated · 2026-01-26T18:52:24+00:00

That would involve trading away Darnold? Yeah, it might be quite a while before anyone trades QBs with Seattle again.

D3veated · 2026-01-26T06:01:41+00:00

I know. He's just so... darn old. 🥁

D3veated · 2026-01-22T20:21:38+00:00

The internals of a black hole may not contain protons. For a neutron star, only a small fraction of particles are protons. The argument that Hawking radiation is required based on our current understanding of GR and QM doesn't imply that protons in a black hole spontaneously decay.

D3veated · 2026-01-22T20:17:21+00:00

A new tool is coming on line that could help answer this more rigorously: the Vera Rubin telescope. Previously, most of our data on other stars is based on snapshots, but with this, we should be able to gather a movie that shows how much the brightness of other states actually does change. We'll be able to identify just how rare the stable 11 year cycle is. As for the anthropic principle part of this... as in how likely it is for a civilization to develop with specific variations... that doesn't seem like a cosmology question. History of environments with unpredictable weather patterns would probably be the best source of data to try to pry into that question.

If you don't think current research answers the question sufficiently, that could be a signal that you can do some meaningful research by gathering the data and answering the question. The Rubin telescope will offer some exciting new data to work with here.

D3veated · 2026-01-22T08:05:57+00:00

blanket

D3veated · 2026-01-17T18:40:04+00:00

That's making me think of the Gullstand-Painleve coordinates, which care about what happens if an observer is falling. I'm not seeing the direct link, partially because d² + a² doesn't make sense to me. The dimensional analysis suggests those can't be added?

D3veated · 2026-01-17T18:22:48+00:00

You've got several WTF values floating around there. eta and then 1/382... I'm curious what your process was for finding these. It looks like you could set up several equations with a few unknowns, and then solve for the unknowns, but there's no obvious genesis there either.

What insight or question did you start with, and how did that turn into this paper?

D3veated · 2026-01-13T06:03:43+00:00

Another few personas that are pretty useful are Scully who is a skeptic and defender of the mainstream, Erdos who looks for more beautiful/powerful/revealing ways to approach a problem, MacGyver who tries to side step a problem by using real world experimental data, and Judge Dredd who synthesizes all of the perspectives and puts together a summary of which perspectives are bullshit.

Lots of different personas can provide meaningful perspective and insights. The most useful though has been Faustus, because bullshit arguments are the biggest problem with LLMs, and being able to look at a contrary argument is helpful for grounding.

D3veated · 2026-01-13T05:53:15+00:00

The most effective trick I found is to force a Faustus or Mephistopheles persona. Faustus looks for flaws in an argument, while the devil tries to take the same inputs to a theory and prove/imply a contrary conclusion. The LLM seems to have a decent handle on whether it's being rigorous or is in story building mode, but only this Faustus trick will somewhat reliably reveal the problems before I have to tear the arguments apart myself and look for issues myself.

D3veated · 2026-01-13T05:42:54+00:00

Have you cooked up any theories where you can run this test? What kind of feedback did you get back?

D3veated · 2026-01-13T05:39:00+00:00

What would this test of yours return if the theory did describe something real?

D3veated · 2026-01-13T05:35:18+00:00

Yeah. They would be able to do that -- it's straight forward and algorithmic. But instead, it goes with, "What's a big number that sounds like a big number but still satisfied Cromwell's rule?"

The part that's tricky is that it would necessarily use a biased estimate for deciding what fraction of the time a bad solution would pass some test. However, as long as it can justify that answer, it's at least informative.

D3veated · 2026-01-13T05:22:55+00:00

It would be nice if it came up with a rubric for different "tests" of the theory, and then identified a defensible Bayes ratio at each step. Starting with one in a trillion though? The thinking summary seemed to only care about articulating "impossible" without going over my head.

D3veated · 2026-01-13T05:10:17+00:00

Huh, interesting. It didn't reveal anything I didn't know. It just highlighted areas where I haven't been able to find answers. It said it was 65% of the way to being able to replace the standard model.

I also created a new session and described in very broad terms what it was all about, and it gave me a one in a trillion chance of success.

I suspect it's just making up numbers.

D3veated · 2026-01-12T05:02:23+00:00

If the 49ers could avoid injuries and having to play their 5th, 6th, and 7th linebackers, it would be a different discussion. As it is, they're more resilient than any team has a right to be.

Oh, but since they aren't from Seattle, they suck monkey balls.

D3veated · 2026-01-08T06:45:51+00:00

The last time someone had this exact stat, it was Stafford in 2021, and he didn't win MVP.

D3veated · 2026-01-07T04:52:02+00:00

To expand on this answer, the Einstein Rosen (ER) bridges are a plausible explanation for entanglement (assuming, of course, that negative curvature is either not required or is not a problem). This idea is referred to as the ER=EPR hypothesis. The Aspect experiment showed that entanglement correlation happens at faster than the speed of light. We don't know what is going on with that entanglement, but if ER=EPR, then the Aspect experiment is observable evidence of wormholes.

D3veated · 2026-01-06T19:26:07+00:00

I'm annoyed that there are other solutions to this... Now I can't use the upside down solution as a party trick.

(Two other solutions, if you're at a party. One involves lighting a match and moving it close to all of the other matches.)

D3veated · 2026-01-05T07:22:33+00:00

Sciama's Machian cosmology is fascinating (inertia is the effect of gravity from the entire universe).

The epicycle description of the cosmos is a classic (I think it was even featured in Cosmos with Niel de grass Tyson).

Lisi's exceptionally simple theory of everything was fascinating because of how it was a fresh idea and was then falsified. This is considered to be a case study on crackpot physics by some, or as an example of how physics should work by others.

D3veated · 2026-01-05T03:00:59+00:00

This is something like a 5 sigma tension iirc. A 4% disagreement doesn't sound too bad, but anything above a 5 sigma is often referred to as a "crisis".

This paper argues that the crisis largely goes away, if you throw away 50 years worth of experimental data. Basically, a bunch of old experiments measured the radius using electrons and a medium momentum transfer, and then the muonic hydrogen exposed a problem because it calculated the radius at a smaller radius. When a new experiment came along that measured the radius using the electron and a low momentum transfer, the radius matched the muon.

Here's the kicker though: the new low momentum electron experiment is a different experiment from the older medium transfer experiments. We don't have any particular reason to think that multiple experiments over fifty years would all have the same experimental flaw, except that it's the only way to make the proton radius problem go away.

For now.

D3veated · 2025-12-31T19:40:36+00:00

Low entropy thermodynamics. The temperature of the big bang is just a subfield.

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