 | Wanted to share one of my personal projects, since similar work has been shared here. TLDR is that I trained an LLM from scratch on pre-1900 text to see if it could come up with quantum mechanics and relativity. The model was too small to do meaningful reasoning, but it has glimpses of intuition. When given observations from past landmark experiments, the model can declare that “light is made up of definite quantities of energy” and even suggest that gravity and acceleration are locally equivalent. I’m releasing the dataset + models and leave this as an open problem. You can play with one of the early instruction tuned models here (not physics post trained): gpt1900.com Blog post: https://michaelhla.com/blog/machina-mirabilis.html [link] [comments] |
Pre-1900 LLM Relativity Test
Reddit r/LocalLLaMA / 4/6/2026
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Key Points
- A developer trained an LLM from scratch on pre-1900 text to test whether it can independently generate ideas from quantum mechanics and relativity.
- The project found that the model is too small for meaningful multi-step reasoning, though it sometimes produces plausible “intuitive glimpses” tied to physics concepts.
- When prompted with observations from landmark historical experiments, the model produced statements resembling quantum and relativity claims (e.g., quantized energy for light and local equivalence of gravity and acceleration).
- The author is releasing both the dataset and models and frames the work as an open problem for the community to extend.
- Users can try an early instruction-tuned version at gpt1900.com, with additional details available via the linked blog post and GitHub repository.
