This is as good a time as any to note that we might be closing in on a new conceptual revolution in our own time as it relates to holography and an information centric approach to spacetime. Obviously It's the furthest possible thing from a guarantee, but it has much of the enthusiasm and motivation that string theory had previously enjoyed in prior decades.

So it could be a natural experiment for whether AI can contribute to novel physics. Specifically, there's a big question about weather. Something like our informational understanding of black holes where information inside it is equivalent to information on its boundary (which I'm sure I'm not saying correctly), might be generalized to regular space-time. More people should be freaking out with excitement about this and perhaps it's something to which AI can contribute.

There was symbolic AI programs in the 1980’s that “discovered” Kepler’s laws and the resulting solar system model from just tycho brache’s astronomical observations. That was the the very first “new physics” ever.

i wonder if we could train a modal, and omit all data prior to 1899, and see what happens?

as always, as good as its prompt...

That’s already been done. I know of at least one novel result contributed by Claude to frontier physics. I’m sure there is more.

Would this be possible without it being able to run novel real-world physics experiments autonomously?

(Note: I am not suggesting we let it do this. Please don't, in fact)

For it to be like a human it wouldn't just need to solve existing phsyics problems, it would need to push the field forward and introduce new paradigms.