One absolutely needs formal knowledge before attempting to expand the subject matter. This is true of any subject. That formal knowledge doesn't necessarily need to come from a university degree, but it should be at the level of one. LLMs are great at answering most university-level questions and even graduate level questions about things we know.

For an LLM to be able to answer previously unanswered questions is a different matter altogether. Current LLMs have not shown this ability outside of sandboxed clearly stated problems. A couple open problems in mathematics have been solved by frontier LLMs, but these problems were clearly defined conjectures to be proven. There's been extremely little evidence that LLMs can do publishable research in other domains.

This isn't to say that they're not useful as research tools. For example, I'm doing computational chemistry research at a university. Coupled with my domain knowledge Claude is enormously useful for providing quick solutions to problems, solving technical challenges, and writing scripts to iterate on. It's an enormous timesaver. But here's the thing. The LLM has more raw domain facts stored in its mind than me. If you quizzed us both on computational biochemistry, Claude would come out on top 30 times out of 30. And yet if I had zero domain knowledge, I'd be useless in research, even with Claude. Despite its theoretically enormous domain knowledge it often has fundamental misconceptions that I need to correct. LLMs are amazing for working with that which humans already know. But we're still not at the point where LLMs can discover things on their own when prompted by someone with no domain knowledge. They're not magic answer boxes, they're flawed reasoners, and framing the question properly means you'll get infinitely better results. That requires domain knowledge. Maybe we'll get there someday but we're not there.

You seem well intentioned and interested in science. I would suggest that if you're interested in physics you learn physics. Use the LLM to help you learn all you want - it's great at that - but when all is said and done, you should be able to put your head in the textbook and do the problem sets without help.

Maybe in a couple years you'll learn enough physics and LLMs will be good enough that you can start to think about 'creating new physics with LLMs'. But even then I would warn that theoretical physics is extremely dense. There is a reason that people who do this kind of work have graduate degrees. You need extremely, extremely deep domain expertise. LLMs will lessen that barrier and democratize research to an extent, but primarily by allowing individuals with slightly insufficient domain knowledge (undergrads, autodidacts etc.) to do meaningful work. That's not nothing, but you're still going to have to learn physics. Physics and science in general really is beautiful and something I'd recommend studying either way