well the people who did the Higgs boson theory worked and re-worked for years all the prior work about elementary particles and arguably did a bunch of re-mixing of all the previous “there might be a new elementary particle here!” work until they hit on something that convinced enough peers that it could be validated in a real-world experiment.

by which i mean to say that it doesn’t seem completely implausible that an llm could generate the first tentative papers in that general direction. perhaps one could go back and compute the likelihood of the first papers on the boson given only the corpus to date before it as researchers seem to be trying to do with the special relativity paper which is viewed as a big break with physics beforehand.