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Rajesh Gopakumar's avatar

Great post! A footnote physics comment (which only strengthens the points you are making): One of Maxwell's great achievements, in some sense going beyond the ones you mentioned, is the introduction of the field as an abstract but fundamental physical entity with its own dynamics untethered to any material object. It liberated physics from the newtonian paradigm of particle motion being everything. It was also an important feat of abstraction to talk of the local field since most of the earlier known laws of electromagnetism (Gauss, Ampere) were formulated as integrals - in terms of currents and electric/magnetic fluxes.

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Sam's avatar

Transformational creativity, as Boden (1990) calls it, is widely considered the pinnacle form of scientific innovation and discovery. Our recent paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18687) mathematically formalizes this notion and recently won a best short paper award. In short, the modification of axioms tends to lead to more transformative breakthroughs, and there isn’t any reason to assume this capability is beyond the reach of today’s systems. However, like many, I am skeptical that statistical systems alone are sufficient to make discoveries on par with Einstein, Newton, Kepler, and more. Our follow-up work aims to address some of these concerns with a neurosymbolic approach.

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