Standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were
It's still unclear whether this process could be merely continued, seeded only with new physical data, in order to keep progressing beyond that point, "forever", or at least for as long as we imagine humans will continue to go on making scientific progress.
THat's not how science works.
The LLM would have to propose experiments (which would have to be simulated), and then develop its theories from that.
Maybe there had been enough facts around to suggest a number of hypotheses, but the LLM in its curent form won't be able to confirm them.
I by no means believe LLMs are general intelligence, and I've seen them produce a lot of garbage, but if they could produce these revolutionary theories from only <= year 1900 information and a prompt that is not ridiculously leading, that would be a really compelling demonstration of their power.
It turns out my reading is somewhat topical. I've been reading Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and of the things he takes great pains to argue (I was not quite anticipating how much I'd be trying to recall my high school science classes to make sense of his account of various experiments) is that the development toward the atomic bomb was more or less inexorable and if at any point someone said "this is too far; let's stop here" there would be others to take his place. So, maybe, to answer your question.
Yes. It is certainly a question if Einstein is one of the smartest guy ever lived or all of his discoveries were already in the Zeitgeist, and would have been discovered by someone else in ~5 years.
Kind of, how long would it have realistically taken for someone else (also really smart) to come up with the same thing if Einstein wouldn't have been there?
