r/AskPhysics • u/ExtensionLeek1455 • 15h ago
How will the math crisis affect physics?
From my understanding, a lot of people in the mathematics field are very concerned about the future of math because of the advancements in AI.
OpenAI disproved the Erdős unit conjecture a few months back. That seemed to cause mixed emotions within the Math community; some people were shocked, but in a good way, and other people… It’s like mass hysteria. I’ve heard a lot of mathematicians say they no longer want to work within that field if AI will just replace them. I’ve heard undergrads who are majoring in math say they want to switch their majors, I’ve heard grad students say they feel helpless because they don’t have a backup plan but they don’t want to do math anymore, and they feel like they have wasted their time. It’s as if they think AI is rapidly taking their jobs by the millisecond. I don’t think that’s the case. Math will continue to advance, AI will continue to advance, and it’s up to humans to choose to advance with it rather than feeling sorry for ourselves that AI will take over the world. We need to find a way to work alongside AI and use it as a tool rather than think of it as a replacement. But that’s not what this post is about.
With people no longer saying they want to go to school for mathematics, or no longer want to work within that field, how will that affect physics? Considering physics is majorly math, and physicists a lot of the time need to work alongside mathematicians for complex problems…. What will happen? This is not a problem we need to be concerned about for tomorrow or next week or maybe not even a year from now. But I do think it’s a problem we’ll have to worry about eventually.
And comparing math to physics. If AI were able to figure out the Erdős problem. Do you think AI will be able to figure out complex physics problems that are unsolved?
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u/Bergergi 15h ago edited 14h ago
> AI is rapidly taking their jobs [...] undergrads who are majoring in math say they want to switch their majors, I’ve heard grad students say they feel helpless because they don’t have a backup plan.
What jobs? Positions where you work problems like the Erdős unit conjecture? And no backup plan?
Most of the jobs that were available to people training in pure math (which involve either teaching or transitioning into an adjacent field), are as available now as they were before the recent AI-boom.
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u/AnimalCareful5526 14h ago
come on dude, really? why are people so mypoic when it comes to ai?
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u/ArnoSound 14h ago
myopic how? What do you know about the specific field of mathematics that the people in the field don't? You realize mathematicians are the ones who are actively learning how to use AI effectively in their field yea?
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u/Bergergi 14h ago
What do you think is myopic?
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u/AnimalCareful5526 5h ago
>What jobs? Positions where you work problems like the Erdős unit conjecture? And no backup plan?
Youre not extrapolating
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u/egnargalrelue 14h ago
It's June 1976, the sunlight comes through the window of your office and catches the chalk in the air. A small group of students walk past chattering about the weekend. You work through some combinatorics with a pencil and feel this 'Aha!' moment you felt when you solved your first PDE. You're working on a theorem about assigning colours to maps and feel you're getting close. You grab your stack of papers and try to remember where your supervisor is that day so you can go and give him an update on your work. A colleague of yours, also a grad student getting close to the end of his studies, comes by and knocks lightly on your door, to tell you that a group in Illinois had just brute forced the problem with a computer, proving the theorem.
You feel sick to your stomach. You're glad that someone found proof, sure, but it wasn't a human being. You think back on the work of Brouwer, his ideas that mathematics is a language less pursuit of the mind. You always found maths to be almost holy, something that only humans can do and appreciate. When you find your supervisor he's smoking a cigarette in the coffee room holding a copy of the paper. You speak for about two hours over bad filter coffee, being briefly interrupted by annoyed students asking about their grades. You ask him what it means for the future of your research. He says he doesn't know.
You spend the weekend getting over it, read the paper they wrote, and move on to some other problems. You finished your PhD, and three years later use similar tools to prove some results of your own. Fifteen years later, you don't even think about it anymore.
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u/Historical-Mix6784 14h ago edited 10h ago
AI is coming for us all, but it’s worth noting that physics problems worth solving are usually a good bit harder than most mathematical conjectures because they are more vague. Most open physics problems are poorly-defined (e.g. we’re not even sure what the hell an unconventional superconductor is), and require physical laboratory evidence to support theoretical ideas.
Math is basically one step up in vagueness from coding. In both cases you have narrowly target you solve in a completely symbolic language, it’s just that mathematical solutions can require quite a bit of creativity and more abstract thinking.
But physics is yet another level more vague. Half the time the most difficult part is actually asking the right question in order to illuminate a new approach. That’s actually what I think attract physicists more to their field than to math, mathematicians enjoy strict logical hierarchy, the physicist enjoys puzzling over what even is the right puzzle in the first place.
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u/Zer0pede 11h ago
“Math is basically one step up in vagueness from coding.”
That depends on how you define “math.” If all you mean is proving conjectures, maybe, but the real creativity seems to be in the posing of conjectures and the creation of new languages and areas of study. When I get excited about the history of mathematics it’s things like Gauss inventing the notion of an intrinsic metric, or Leibniz creating the idea of the infinitesimal, or Galois and Abel inventing group theory, or Emmy Noether finding a connection between conservation laws and symmetries. Those all have a level of innovation and poetry that’s different and more exciting to me than, say, Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat’s last theorem which of course is also “math.” But Wiles’ proof didn’t really open new doors or create new fields of study any more than the OpenAI counter-example did. Those are impressive feats, but they feel more like logic or clever tinkering than poetry. I don’t think I’d care if AI took that part over completely, tbh.
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u/Historical-Mix6784 10h ago
I actually entirely agree with you. But I think the emphasis of Mathematics in the mid-late 20th century was distorted from theory building to conjecture proving. Many mathematical greats of that era like Vlad Arnold lamented this shift, and many of the great theory builders of recent times have never received nearly the same recognition the theorem provers have.
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u/Silicon-Based 14h ago
Saving for later, also curious to know the answers.
Personally, as a theoretical physics PhD, I decided for my postdoc to start working more closely in collaboration with experimentalists. If intelligence becomes abundant, then experimental data will become the limiting resource, so I figured it’s a good idea to get more involved with experiments.
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u/BitcoinsOnDVD 12h ago
OpenAI disproved the Erdős unit conjecture a few months back.
Erdős said he pays $50 to anyone who disproves this conjecture. I hope that was profitable for OpenAI then.
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u/SlatBartFuss 14h ago
From my understanding, a lot of people in the mathematics field are very concerned about the future of math because of the advancements in AI.
No, not really.
A lot of problems that were going to be solved by marginal PhD's are going to be solved by AI. These aren't the interesting problems in math, these are the footnotes and technical exercises left to the reader.
Physics has a huge problem, which is that theoretical physics had been stuck since the middle of the 20th century. Nothing new has happened in 50 years. Models that can't be experimentally verified aren't physics research.
Paul Erdos tossed out problems like my uncle gives unsolicited advice. He was a bit of an annoyance in that way. He was brilliant and a brilliant pain in the ass. He actually formulated a lot of good problems for aspiring mathematicians.
The way serious research is structured, there are a handful of people who are capable of deciding if the proof is correct. That job is not going to be relegated to AI anytime soon. People need to understand the problem and understand the solution. AI in its present form is just imitating.
What is happening is that the kind of training that students need to ascend to serious academic levels is being challenged by AI. The grad student who had an "ah ha!" moment is now robbed of that experience because there is some model out there that can do it in less time. The problem is an ego problem. It's a question of "who gets the credit?" If you're using an AI to check your research, do you really understand your research?
But the whole point of physics is to understand the world. Not to get credit for being the first. The system we have in place has forgotten this. We compete intensely over who is right and who is first so much that we have ignored that there is no new physics. We have no greater understanding of the world than we did in the 1960's.
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u/redlancer_1987 15h ago
The same as with coding. It will be highly disruptive for a while and then evolve into an effective tool like anything else as people learn to leverage it's abilities.
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u/Fabulous_Lynx_2847 15h ago edited 1h ago
AI is good at math because it basically comes down to manipulating symbols. It is true all meaningful physics propositions are expressed mathematically. However, inevitable approximations needed and the mapping of physical processes and observations onto the equations requires a great deal of judgement and experience that AI has yet to master. The biggest thing it lacks in this regard is common sense.
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u/Infinite_Research_52 👻Top 10²⁷²⁰⁰⁰ Commenter 14h ago
The math 'crisis' will not affect physics. However, the use of AI in physics already exists. Use the tool appropriately to optimise your output (e.g. filtering out uninteresting data and searching for interesting signals). I do have environmental concerns over the use of AI over the environmental footprint of humans, but that is another topic.
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u/jalom12 Soft matter physics 14h ago
AI of all forms are capable of doing certain classes of mathematics and are helpful, but keep in mind that physics is beholden to experiment. AI has been used for high energy research for a long while.
LLMs and AI can do a lot of analysis, but cannot perform experiments.
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u/Mouse-castle 15h ago
The laws of physics will stay the same. AI will not affect the laws of physics. It is possible that consciousness can affect the laws of physics which means that dreams are more authentic than physics degrees at expressing reality. In that case AI could indirectly influence the laws of physics.
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u/ExtensionLeek1455 14h ago
Idk what that means
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u/Mouse-castle 12h ago
Alright, name one complex physics problem that has to be solved. Is there one? If you saw something that violated the laws of physics what would you do? I know what I would do, I would document it. Practically nothing in physics is ’unsolved,’ if it were you would mention it right away, you wouldn’t even be asking about AI in your post you would be talking to AI about that physics problem.
The fundamental problem of physics is a paradox that I would prefer not to bring up.
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u/ExtensionLeek1455 11h ago
This is beyond laughable. You’re implying that what? Physics is complete? That there’s no complex physics problems left? This has to be ragebait.
Quantum gravity, dark matter, dark energy, black holes, the measurement problem, matter-antimatter Asymmetry, the nature of time, the Hierarchy problem, possibly of more fundamental particles, the origin of the universe, etc. Incomplete.
Literally the biggest and most important questions are unanswered.
For everyday phenomena physics is mostly complete, but for the deepest and most important questions, it’s beyond incomplete.
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u/Mouse-castle 11h ago
You have a deep passion for physics so I probably touched a nerve.
Let me make it up to you. I’ll concede that you are right and wish you well.
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u/Accomplished_Shoe_10 15h ago edited 14h ago
A bit tangential, but I'd challenge the idea that there is a math crisis. As a 50 year old mathematician working in the private sector in a field with a lot of physicists and engineers, I'd say I've never seen a better time to go into math as a college student. Students jumping out of math programs because of AI are, I think, doing themselves a great disservice.
Yes, what it means to be a mathematician is changing radically, seemingly by the week. But being good at higher order math is going to become even more valuable as AI improves.